MedShr: Pandemic Response

The MedShr Early Warning System (EWS) aims to detect infectious disease outbreaks and enable early interventions to minimise morbidity and mortality. 

MedShr connects over 1.5m doctors and HCPs through clinical case discussion in 195 countries. This network provides unique insights into real world medical practice, and includes granular data from low and middle income countries, where there is often limited information from healthcare providers. 

We are developing MedShr Insights uses medical natural language processing, AI and machine learning to examine healthcare terms, co-occurring terms and their intersections across the platform. The Medshr EWS will combine these outputs, with emerging terms, trend analysis and third party data sources to detect infectious disease outbreaks. 

MedShr operates globally and the initial focus will be on low and middle income countries where the impact of these infectious diseases is the greatest and we have the opportunity to have a postive impact on outcomes. 

MedShr Insights and Early Warning System (EWS) aim to improve the understanding of infectious diseases and identify outbreaks and potential future pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic with >130m cases and >2,840,000 deaths has shown the rapid spread and global impact of a new human virus. Between 2014-2016 there were over 28,000 Ebola virus infection sin Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea with >11,000 deaths. In 2017 there were 100m Dengue infections causing 40,000 deaths. Outbreaks of malaria and tuberculosis continue to cause substantial morbidity and mortality.

These challenging outbreaks span our understanding of the natural history, pathophysiology and treatment of these diseases. MedShr is uniquely placed to both identify and respond to these challenges.

It is often hard to find timely information to identify outbreaks of these diseases in low and middle income countries which often have fragile health infrastructure and very limited resources. MedShr has increasing membership in such countries, especially across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. This enables doctors and healthcare professionals (HCPs) to engage with one another locally, globally and with educational content to improve their practice; and in the process they provide real world data that underpins MedShr Insights and EWS.

MedShr Insights uses medical natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to derive clinical insights from data across the MedShr platform. These insights will help to identify and understand diseases and outbreaks including infectious and novel diseases. Analysis of MedShr emerging terms and intersections with geolocation data will be integrated with other data sources to develop the MedShr Early Warning System (EWS) to identify outbreaks and potential future pandemics.

The cases discussions on MedShr are a rich source of information from the everyday clinical practice of doctors and other HCPs around the world. Members are validated and this provides information on their role, institution and location. Cases can relate to common conditions, complex scenarios, difficult diagnoses, ambiguity and rare diseases. The discussions reflect how doctors interact in person in their practice, both formally and informally, and are an important part of decision-making in patient care.

The MedShr Insights technology applies social listening technology to these unrivalled real world medical data. The structure of the MedShr platform means that we know the context of every healthcare term, who has used it, and the interactions around it. This allows us to use the established taxonomy of SNOMED CT for each sign, symptom, disease, condition, drug, device, procedure and other healthcare term, and then use artificial intelligence to analyse its trends, relationships and impact.

MedShr Insights can analyse any healthcare term, and the co-occurring, intersecting and emerging terms related to it on the platform. These results can be filtered and segmented by a range of parameters including geography, specialty and timeframe. This provides a powerful tool to improve the understanding of diseases, their symptoms, signs and pathophysiology as well as the geographical variations in presentation, investigation and treatment.

Automation of these processes using artificial intelligence with training sets related to known infectious diseases and past outbreaks will form the basis of the EWS. MedShr Insights will initially analyse data from MedShr, and is structured so that in future it will also ingest data from other sources such as open social media, scientific research, electronic health records, digital news and medical publications.

The global reach of MedShr, with members in low and middle income countries, also provides an unrivalled channel to support and educate doctors and HCPs in response to outbreaks and novel diseases. 

MedShr users include doctors and other HCPs, and our clients and partners are from a wide range of academic and commercial organisations as indicated in the attached PDF. We provide a trusted, secure platform for clinical learning, case discussion and medical education.

MedShr Insights clients include:

Healthcare providers, health ministries, medical societies and colleges, academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, communications and marketing agencies, financial services companies. We provide insights on real world medicine and clinical practice, with temporal and geographical variation with context from health metrics and medical publications.

MedShr Early Warning System clients include:

Public health bodies, health ministries, academic institutions, NGOs and research organisations on a not-for-profit basis. We provide data and insights on outbreaks of infectious diseases and potential future pandemics to support healthcare planning, research and public health policy

We use performance metrics, user feedback, engagement workshops, client and partner meetings as well as in-house and published research to understand our member and client needs. There is a widespread ongoing program of multi-channel engagement to extend this consultation. As we develop MedShr Insights recent meetings with potential clients and partners such as IHME, McKinsey and Dr Evidence have included product profiling and prototype demonstrations.

Pandemics and outbreaks span our understanding of the natural history, pathophysiology and treatment of infectious diseases. MedShr is uniquely placed to identify and respond to these challenges.

It is often hard to find timely disease information in low and middle income countries which often have fragile health infrastructure and limited resources. MedShr has increasing membership in such countries, especially across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. This enables HCPs to engage with one another locally, globally and with educational content to improve their practice; and in the process they provide real world data that underpins MedShr Insights and EWS.

MedShr is established as the only global network for doctors with members in 195 countries across all clinical specialties. It has a trusted brand and partnerships with over 200 medical societies and educational partners.

The platform is successful in having grown since its launch in 2015 to over 1.5 million members with >30,000 new members every month. The business is profitable with increasing revenue. There are high levels of user and partner satisfaction. Education programs have high levels of engagement with evidence of improvements in clinical practice.

MedShr already provides clinical insights to clients using data extracts and individual analysis. The MedShr Insights platform automates this process with NLP and AI, and is in development. The Early Warning System is an extension of this technology.

MedShr is a at the Scale stage and the MedShr Insights technology is at the pilot stage.

The solution is innovative in that it applies social listening technology to a unique global real world medical dataset. The scale and reach of MedShr, especially in low and middle income countries, together with the case discussion and clinical engagement that connect users of the platform, provide an unrivalled data-driven opportunity to develop clinical insights that improve patient care.

The increasing membership and engagement on MedShr, as outlined in the attached PDF, serve to both improve medical education and to increase the depth and quality of data for MedShr Insights and the EWS.

Working in collaboration with medical societies, colleges, boards and academic institutions further enriches both MedShr data and the educational value of the platform. This approach has placed MedShr in the privileged position of having a tangible impact on patient care, and the opportunity to continue to grow through these and new engagement and educational services.

This scale of the MedShr network, with over 1,500,000 doctors and HCPs engaged in learning and education, has a major impact on millions of patients around the world. Increasing MedShr membership and activity is important to enrich the data and predictive value of MedShr Insights and EWS. Currently over 30,000 new members register with MedShr every month, and the projected membership will exceed 2 million by the end of 2022.

MedShr currently serves around 14% of doctors globally and in 5 years we aim to increase to 50%. This extrapolates the impact of MedShr to a substantial proportion of the world's population.

The timeline in the section below indicates the planned milestones for MedShr Insights and EWS and in terms of scale. Most of year one is in product development, with the initial release of subscription reports to clients. The MedShr Commercial Team will support client engagement and partnerships, with initial meetings for Insights with our current pharma clients and society partners.

The impact of the MedShr EWS will be beyond the bounds of MedShr membership and the patients that our members care for. If we are successful in detecting disease outbreaks and improve the understanding of infectious disease this will be a paradigm shift for the public, healthcare providers and governments. 

MedShr is a technology company with a rich analytics and data across the platform and business. We track, analyse and respond to member acquisition, engagement and performance using headline metrics such as:

• Total membership and demographics
• New members and demographics
• Daily and monthly active user rates
• New user generated posts, polls and cases
• Comments, cases, follows and views
• Partner organisation activity and engagement metrics

The membership, engagement and activity metrics can also be filtered and reviewed by specialty, geography and clinical topic, to allow us to determine impact in particular segments and sectors. 

MedShr is tightly aligned with SDG 3 around Education and SDG 4 for Healthcare as well as SDG 5 Gender Equality and SDG 9 Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure. 

Dr Asif Qasim – MedShr CEO

Jude Venn – MedShr CTO

Rosie Higgins – Lead Designer (Formerly COO Benevolent AI)

Florents Tselai – Lead Data Engineer

Anthony Shek – NLP Engineer (KCL PhD candidate in medical NLP)

Will Mclaen – Data scientist

Richard Westernra –Front End Developer (Formerly Quantum Black)

The MedShr leadership team has demonstrated its capability in developing the MedShr technology platform and global network with modest resources in a relatively short time frame. The clinical, technical, commercial and operational skills and experience they have will lead the MedShr Insights program.

The team has also negotiated partnerships and commercial relationships with global corporations and academic organisations, establishing MedShr as a respected brand and trusted partner. The joint working of our clinical, commercial and technical teams have allowed us to engage effectively with our clients and partners.

We have been successful in recruiting experienced professionals to the Insights team who are motivated to use their skills to support the MedShr mission to improve healthcare and save lives. The profiles and enthusiasm of the Insights team.

The positive response of organisations such as IHME, Mckinsey and Dr Evidence to MedShr and the MedShr Insights products we are developing, have provided assurance of the value that these developments will bring to both the public and our partners and clients.

MedShr is an education solution that provides free services to doctors and healthcare professionals globally. The mission to improve healthcare and save lives is underpinned by a strong ethos of equality, diversity and inclusion led by the executive team and supported across the whole organisation. The company is diverse with good gender balance, with women in 50% of the senior roles.

Soon after the launch of MedShr in 2015 we were one of the founding companies of Techfugees using technology to support healthcare for refugees and we have demonstrated our ability to use commercial profits from Europe and the USA to support programs in low and middle income countries. 

The launch of MedShr Learning provides core skills training that includes novel education for doctors and HCPs on LGBTQ from a professional and patient perspective and training on EDI from experts in language and communication. 

The desire to extend our commercial MedShr Insights services to develop and Early Warning System for global good on a not for profit basis