Online Platform Allows Physicians to Collaborate on Complex Cases
Best Doctors, Inc., a global health company that brings together the best minds in medicine to help people get the right diagnosis and treatment plan, has announced the successful deployment of its acclaimed Medting™ solution, a cutting-edge, cloud-based software that allows clinicians to easily and securely collaborate while enabling access to shared diagnostic image and video files.
“The value in this type of platform is that physicians can collaborate on challenging cases with multiple colleagues across institutions and even countries in an open, transparent, and nearly real-time way,” noted Dr. William Wood, a bone marrow transplant clinician at the University of North Carolina. “These discussions provide access to perspectives and pockets of expertise that might or might not be readily available in a physician’s local environment. I think that online, virtual clinical case sharing will stimulate important conversations in the field and will lead to improved outcomes for patients.”
Medting enables physicians to work together on challenging cases, share files and diagnostic images, and build an educational library of medical information. It creates an ideal forum for online tumor boards and other disease-specific meetings by negating time and scheduling conflicts.
Hospitals, medical societies, and health systems are using the online collaboration platform to expand physicians’ access to knowledge and shared understanding. Using the Medting enterprise solution, Best Doctors provides a private, branded forum for each client, wherein the client’s physicians can login and submit a case for peer-to-peer consultation, ask questions of other physicians or conduct training courses for students.
“A physician in one part of the world facing a complicated case can immediately access peer physicians in a completely different part of the world and share access to relevant medical records, family history, and imaging,” stated David Seligman, chairman and chief executive officer at Best Doctors, Inc. “This technology has the potential to save lives thousands of miles away, often in situations where access is the critical deterrent to the highest level of medical care.”
Since announcing the platform’s availability, a number of organizations including the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (ASBMT) have signed on to access the knowledge and educational opportunities offered through it.
“The over 2,000 physician members of ASBMT are on the front lines of research, training, and clinical practice in the areas of blood and marrow transplantation and cellular therapy research,” said Dr. Wood. “Best Doctors and Medting provide a technologically advanced solution to bring many minds together to solve major issues in our field.”
The Medting solution has already seen tremendous results in Europe, where more than 30 hospital systems use it to connect physicians across cities, regions, and countries. That improved communication is leading to better care coordination in hospital systems, which are even using Medting to improve cancer care by increasing oncologist collaboration on tumor boards.
Named for three consecutive years to Inc. magazine’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in America list, Best Doctors continues to innovate around the mission of bringing together the best medical minds to help people get the right diagnosis and treatment. With published studies indicating that 15-28% of patients are misdiagnosed – translating into needless suffering and billions of wasted health care dollars annually – a growing number of Fortune 500 companies, health insurers, and health societies are choosing the Best Doctors diagnostic accuracy services and offerings.