PulsedIn wants to improve communication between physicians, interactions between patients and overall patient engagement through a set of services ranging from physician reviews to second opinions. Physician entrepreneur Karthik Koduru, an oncologist, explained how the businesses he co-founded, PulsedIn and OncoPower, stand out in an increasingly crowded market. He will also talk about these companies at the MedCity ENGAGE conference Nov 6-7 in San Diego.
Q: Why did you start PulsedIn?
Dr. Karthik Koduru
A: We wanted to have a peer-to-peer, physician-facing model like Doximity but we also realized the challenges involved in engaging busy physicians. The level of physician engagement in existing online social media has been dismal. Physicians typically do not have a lot of time to engage online using different apps for different services. When they use an app, they prefer the ability to do multiple things quickly. We wanted to build tools to help them enhance their online reputation, obtain authentic patient and peer reviews, and help them avoid or manage signs of burnout while simultaneously making new connections and reaching new patients. We developed this comprehensive multi-utility social platform where physicians can benefit through multiple services while simultaneously engaging online.
Q: How does PulsedIn help physicians cope with burnout?
Physician burnout has reached epic proportions and now represents a public health crisis. It negatively impacts physician health and patient care. Healthcare organizations may suffer significant financial losses due to physician burnout and increased physician turnover. Most physicians now feel it is critically important for them to collaborate and support themselves academically, intellectually, and emotionally. Enhancing peer support and creating avenues for quick collaboration play an important role in preventing burnout. PulsedIn provides tools and a support platform for physicians to come together to share experiences, discuss their difficult moments and emotional state to improve coping skills. PulsedIn also aims to identify physicians at the highest risk for burnout and then provide them awareness training regarding burnout and coping strategies. Many physicians that experience burnout feel a lack of appreciation and loss of meaning from their work. PulsedIn presents opportunities for such physicians to participate in group activities with other physicians and to help peers and patients online. In return, PulsedIn provides recognition, rewards and positive feedback/appreciation from peers and patients. We have plans to partner with healthcare systems to screen their physician employees for burnout and help the at-risk physicians with coping strategies and provide a peer-support network.
Q: What type of engagement tools are available to physicians on PulsedIn?
We created many engagement tools on PulsedIn after extensively polling several physicians regarding the features they consider most important to them. The physician module offers doctors a way to network with each other. They can create groups, and initiate online discussions. They can get tips on how to grow their practices, improve their reputation among patients, answer questions posted by patients and other physicians, career advancement, and alumni networking.
Physicians can also: Showcase their procedural skills; obtain peer reviews and endorsements from referring physicians; crowdsource medical information; get peer-to-peer communication of specialty-specific, evidence-based guidelines delivered directly to their news feed; publish articles/ case reports. They can also crowdsource information regarding several non-clinical interests such as finance and investing as well as policy issues. PulsedIn also provides dedicated tools to physicians to express their unified voice regarding policy issues which can then be shared with organizations and regulatory authorities to help trigger change.
Using the “HealthBeat” feature, physicians can post several healthcare articles and medical advice, which is then directly delivered to targeted patients and improves visibility and the online reputation of the physician.
You mentioned PulsedIn helps physicians to obtain authentic patient reviews and build their online reputation. Can you elaborate?
A: Some physicians have expressed concerns regarding online anonymous patient reviews published by websites that do not verify the identity of the user and whether the user was a patient of the doctor they reviewed. In many of these cases, there is no way for doctors to reach out to patients to find out what went wrong or how to address the issue. Meanwhile, their reputations could be tarnished. Physicians also feel they have been treated very unfairly by these websites. If some doctors only has two or three patient reviews to begin with, it could give the appearance they have a low star rating.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that 50 percent of patients indicated that online reviews helped them make healthcare decisions. About 78 percent of physicians surveyed said they felt these reviews added additional stress to their jobs. More than half of physicians preferred hospital-sponsored review platforms because it’s easier to verify those comments. These findings have spurred a large number of health systems to adopt their own provider ranking/rating systems. However, the same JGIM survey showed only 47 percent of patients trusted reviews on a hospital website. Yet 57 percent of patients believed reviews on third-party websites because they saw them as less biased, according to the study.
We believe there is a need for a sophisticated, well-designed online review platform that is transparent, can provide verified information and provides tools for private communication between physicians and patients.
PulsedIn’s online review platform provides star ratings only when a physician has accumulated ratings from more than 20 patients. Research shows that most online reviews by patients are positive. More patient reviews will offer a better picture of the doctor and will help neutralize a couple of negative reviews. After a patient’s in-person office visit, a physician’s office or the physician himself may text or email a review/rating link directly to the patient for PulsedIn and post an online review. Only verified patients are allowed to post reviews and the patient’s identity is verified by using services such as Onfido. PulsedIn provides backend reputation management services and tools for physicians or physician offices to privately reach out to the dissatisfied patient to see if they can undo the damage. If approached correctly, these communications improve trust and convert the patient from a critic to a supporter.
Peer ratings/reviews: Physicians often contend that patients lack the medical expertise to review the doctor’s treatment/ procedural skills. It is true that attributes that are most often reviewed by patients have nothing to do with doctor’s medical or procedural skills. The more the physician is endorsed and reviewed by his peers and referring providers from all over the nation, the more it speaks to his or her trusted specialty expertise. We figured reviews posted by referring primary care physicians and peers would be able to provide a decent snapshot of doctor’s procedural and medical skills and in turn, help patients facing complicated healthcare decisions make better choices.
Q: How does the patient module work to increase patient engagement?
A: Over the years, several of my cancer patients have mentioned how difficult it is to travel this journey. They have felt isolated and feel that they lack sufficient support. Those patients fortunate enough to have a strong support system have had better outcomes and a better quality of life. It is difficult to always find a dedicated support group and a lot of my patients have reported turning to Facebook communities for information sharing/ support. One paper analyzed social media use by patients. It sheds light on some limitations of existing social media sites for patient engagement. Research indicates that the use of blogs/ social media by patients for emotional support and personal stories can help people cope with serious health conditions. A lot of information can be gleaned from patients’ interactions on social media. Some of that information can also be useful for clinical trial design. Additionally, patients are increasingly searching for medical information on social networks. However, the presence of unregulated content on these networks results in misinformation for individuals seeking online health information. A YouTube search revealed a large amount of unregulated content and a lot of misinformation, which can cause additional stress to some patients. A Facebook search for medical information mostly revealed promotional content and a large number of irrelevant pages. Few pages were dedicated to social support.
We felt there is a need for a dedicated and personalized social platform to provide both support and validated medical information to patients with chronic illnesses. PulsedIn’s patient module places a great emphasis on providing social support, information and engaging tools as the patients travel their healthcare journey. Patients choose their interests/ illness at the time of registration and are then matched with other patients that share the same illness. Caregivers also can register and be matched with other caregivers based on their interests. Patients can follow and connect with these other patients, create private groups and share their experiences/ medication adverse effects and coping strategies. Medical content provided on PulsedIn is vetted for accuracy. Patient blogs are moderated by expert physicians and any misconceptions are corrected by these moderators who post evidence-based information and relevant study links. Illness-specific curated YouTube videos are delivered to patients’ personalized feed providing a rich educational and supportive experience thereby, facilitating collaborative care.
Through the app’s patient module, patients gain access to ask free questions, consultations, and articles. They can rate and review physicians, gain insights on preventive care, develop and share care plans. On the social network side, they can follow and share discussion threads, create polls and respond to surveys. Institutions and pharma will be provided with tools to reach out to interested patients with preventive health programs, medication information, branded educational programs and patient assistance programs.
Q: What kind of healthcare background do you and your co-founders have?
PulsedIn was co-founded by myself and my med school friend, Dr. Dinesh Reddy. Dinesh happens to be a surgeon in India and he is very passionate about healthcare innovation in India. He has a strong knowledge about healthcare trends in India and how the local markets work. PulsedIn stands to benefit from this merging of knowledge/ healthcare insights gleaned from already developed and rapidly developing healthcare systems in the two world’s largest democracies.
Q: Are you interested in international expansion?
A: In the Middle East and India, there is a lot of demand for U.S. board-certified physician opinions. Initially, PulsedIn’s panel of select physicians will provide these second opinion services to patients in India. We are introducing this step by step.
In India, we also plan to roll out a price transparency feature for patients and invite hospitals to participate. Most patients in India tend to pay out-of-pocket. Most institutions are already providing package pricing for most procedures there. We want institutions to post prices of procedures, especially of elective procedures. The challenge in the U.S market is that negotiations between hospitals, payers and physician groups determine the price. Price transparency in U.S market needs more brainstorming.
Q: Let’s talk about OncoPower. What are some of your goals for this website aimed at cancer patients.
OncoPower is an oncologist-designed, participant-owned platform that utilizes blockchain technology and digital health to help improve cancer care and precision medicine by incentivizing participants. OncoPower helps oncologists build a complete patient treatment history, rewards patients for reporting data and content, facilitates peer-to-peer virtual consultations, and enables smart contracts between payers and providers, patients, and pharmaceutical brands. The goal is to improve medication adherence and report cancer treatment and genetic data. OncoPower was co-founded by Ram Sesha, Whitney Ahneman and myself and is supported by many expert physician advisers.
