A dream four decades in the making

For more than forty years I've carried one idea around. A physician looking at a patient's blood work, simple or complicated, should be able to get an expert to read it with them.

Not because they can't read a lab report. They can. The hard cases are the ones where twenty or thirty results have to be read together, and the pattern only shows up if you've seen it many times before. That's what a diagnostic expert is for.

Why it never left the building

I built teams to do exactly that at Mass General, Vanderbilt and UTMB. They worked, and the doctors used them. Every one of them stayed inside the hospital where it was built.

The medicine was never the problem. Getting the case to me was. Every health system runs its own electronic health record, and connecting to each one was its own project. For decades a national version was too expensive and too hard to build.

What changed this year

This spring, the team at 1health approached me about building it properly. ExpertDx is built on 1health, which handles the software and the security, so I can stay focused on the medicine.

So we built the front door. A physician sends a case in a few clicks, with no new software and no fax. The case arrives organized and readable. I review it, correct what needs correcting, and sign an interpretation with recommended next steps, in minutes rather than hours.

You stay the ordering physician, and the signed report goes in the chart.

It has to work for everyone who sees the patient, from the nurse practitioner in a rural clinic to the surgeon deciding whether to operate. That's what makes a national network possible.

Where we are now

We're adding experts across specialties, and the first practices to join help decide where we grow next.

We're opening with a founding cohort of 50 practices. Founding members pay $150 a case and have a direct line to me on how the service develops.

If you have a case you keep coming back to, reserve a spot at www.expert-dx.com, or reach out through the site and I'll walk you through it myself. I'd like to read your hardest cases with you.

Dr. Mike Laposata, founder, ExpertDx

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