avoMD
avoMD – Personalized medical guidelines, in seconds.
The Catalyst
While dealing with the day-to-day difficulties in medical training and clinical practice, Dr. Joongheum Park, a board-certified internal medicine physician and software developer, began developing what is now avoMD. While practicing medicine himself, Dr. Park realized that doctors had an issue of getting the right knowledge quickly at the point of care. With medical knowledge doubling every seventy-three days and most of it being buried in journal articles that can be 100+ pages long, 45% of patients do not receive the standard of care. This leads to medical errors and wasted healthcare spend.
That’s where avoMD comes in.
The Team
The executive leadership team of avoMD consists of two doctors, Dr. Joongheum Park as Head of Product and Dr. Yair Saperstein as CEO, and Columbia Business School student, Laurence Coman as CFO. The team is uniquely positioned to develop and distribute the mobile clinical application and content platform. With the clinical decision support market expected to grow from a $7 billion market today to $12 billion by 2023, the space is ripe for innovation and the avoMD executive team brings a strong mix of clinical experience, technical expertise, and business acumen to the company.
avoMD
avoMD is a mobile clinical application and content platform where clinicians are guided step-by-step through the process of diagnosis and treatment at the point of care, with relevant portions of the guidelines curated to the specific clinical situation at hand. With avoMD’s unique approach, the company set out to demo and market the product with three clinical use cases. Currently, the clinical library helps providers interpret ABGs (arterial blood gas) and assess/treat urinary tract infections and skin and soft tissue infections.
avoMD’s content is authored by physicians themselves. Clinical care leaves no room for error. As opposed to other industries where startups can release half-baked minimum viable products, avoMD must ensure that its content is 100% correct before releasing it for consumption.
avoMD synthesizes the relevant pieces of guidelines relevant to the patient at hand, only providing what the physician needs to know in order to treat that patient. For example, a patient comes in to the doctor for a skin infection, the app would then prompt the physician through a series of questions about the patient that leads to a clinical recommendation. The app also provides definitions for medical terms in the app in case the doctor needs further definition or computation assistance.
The app is available on the App Store and Google Play. With no advertising, the avoMD app and its previous versions have been downloaded ~35,000 times and has 1,000 monthly active users. Additionally, avoMD has conducted extensive usability testing at Englewood Hospital where physicians have found the software to be more usable than Gmail and Amazon.com. The next part of this trial involves measuring how the software impacts patient outcomes and physician efficiency.
The Future
avoMD is developing pilots and partnerships with hospitals whereby these institutions can gain access to both avoMD’s entire clinical library and customized protocols for a license subscription fee. avoMD also offers hospitals the ability to integrate into their electronic health record system. At scale, avoMD can act as a marketplace for the buying and selling of institution-specific protocols. Additionally, there may be the opportunity to discern diagnosis and treatment trends from app usage.
avoMD’s “long-term goal is to give doctors medical guidelines for basically every clinical circumstance.”
avoMD aims to improve patient outcomes and physician efficiency, which will ultimately effect constituents in the healthcare ecosystem (health systems and payors). Physicians will have an app that delivers a seamless UX and provides synthesizable, relevant data that is created by physicians. Patient outcomes are expected to improve as physicians’ adherence to guidelines/protocols increases. Payors and health systems should see reduced costs as unwarranted clinical variation is reduced and physician efficiency is improved.
On the content creation side, avoMD is crowdsourcing content where residents and attendings without coding expertise can program medical knowledge into the app using a user-friendly authorship tool.
In addition to the downloads and ongoing trials mentioned previously, earlier this year avoMD was accepted into ELab, a prestigious six-month training and mentorship for entrepreneurs in NYC’s life sciences and health tech community. Additionally, avoMD was recently accepted in Almaworks, Columbia’s start-up accelerator.
Fundraising for avoMD has kicked and prospective investors can contact the company at lc@avomd.io. Users can try out the product by downloading the avoMD app on the App Store at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/avomd-medical-guidelines/id1114334146 or on Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avomd.client.