For 10 years, Doug Grose, Chief Executive Officer of AllMedx, envisioned a “Google for doctors.” With extensive experience in medical communications, Grose knew doctors were frustrated with conventional search engines like Google and Bing because results were often diluted with unreliable content that was intended for consumers and patients. He felt that physicians and other healthcare professionals could benefit from a search tool that sourced its content solely from MD-vetted articles, high-impact medical journals, and other select, reputable clinical sources. The goal was to eliminate irrelevant, consumer-type pieces that would be of little-to-no value to physicians looking for answers to clinical, point-of-care questions.
Once the AllMedx corpus was built, Fusion was used to index data sources including PubMed, CDC, FDA, the leading physician news sites, clinicaltrials.gov, rarediseases.org, NIH DailyMed, Merck Manuals Professional, and many more, including clinical guidelines from 230 medical societies and thousands of branded drug sites.
AllMedx.com is customized to each user based on their interests, previous queries and behavior, and medical specialty. For example, a cardiologist searching for “valve defects” will first see articles in their query results that other cardiologists searching for “valve defects” previously found helpful. Cutting-edge algorithms in Fusion, using AI and ML, automate the content indexing and tailor search results so AllMedx.com is able to provide doctors with the answers they seek faster than other sites.
Fusion has been the muscle behind AllMedx’s search since the launch of the website in April 2018. The user-friendly Fusion platform allows the AllMedx internal development team to be hands-on. Chief Operating Officer and Editor- in-Chief Carol Nathan performs one-on-one user testing with physicians in all medical specialties on a regular basis and can easily tune query pipelines accordingly with this user feedback. With Fusion, the staff has time for real-time improvements, can index new content quickly, and can do a lot of the configuration from the admin panel without having to engage with engineers working on code-level development.
In a particularly unique and market-first application, AllMedx boiled down the medical field into a taxonomy of 12,000 disease states and applied this taxonomy to more than seven million documents across dozens of data sources on a platform called AllMedicine.
AllMedicine is updated daily with links from 2,000 sources and has 10 to 20 times more content than other physician resources, all neatly organized in the way doctors think about patient care. With the large taxonomy and number of records, the processing power required was a big question, and the team was concerned that the process to properly index the data could take months. However, using Fusion, the team efficiently and elegantly indexes sources and applies their taxonomy on a regular basis, with a full index taking just a few hours each day.
For AllMedx, Fusion has been intuitive, efficient, and dependable. “We’ve never been down. It’s been very stable, 100% stable,” says Grose.
The site’s popularity and reputation is steadily increasing. The AllMedx team plans to index up to 2,000 additional medical sites, which will allow them to serve each medical specialty with a robust variety of quick and easy-to-navigate resources. Based on physician user feedback, the AllMedx team is confident the site will increase access to critical, clinical point-of-care information that will help improve patient care.