NEW YORK (360Dx) – The American Medical Association said today that it has teamed up with several of the nation's top medical societies, institutions, and boards as part of a long-term collaboration to help address gaps in providing specialty care to underserved patients.
The AMA, among the largest physician groups in the US, said that it will engage its members to volunteer on Human Dx, the Human Diagnosis Project, which is an online system that enables doctors to help their patients and each other while scaling up the system for worldwide use.
The Human Dx system enables doctors to obtain an electronic consult for their patients from specialist doctors and combines their perspectives using technology that structures, encodes, and analyzes data so that the system is continually learning and improving.
Treating doctors record their patients' backgrounds and medical findings. The system invites specialists to review cases and record recommended tests and diagnoses. To provide physicians with information to make clinical decisions, the system combines and analyzes specialists' information, as well as patients' symptoms, physical exams, medical history, medical imaging results, and diagnostic and laboratory tests.
In the future, Human Dx will also incorporate genomics, epigenomics, and proteomics information, as well as published medical research and health outcomes data, the AMA said.
In addition to the AMA, the alliance members consist of the American Board of Internal Medicine and its foundation; the American Board of Medical Specialties; the Association of American Medical Colleges; the Association of Clinicians for the Underserved; the National Association of Community Health Centers; and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
The newly formed alliance will support Human Dx’s mission to create more accurate, affordable, and accessible healthcare for millions of underserved Americans, the AMA said.
AMA noted that over the next five years, the alliance will scale the Human Dx system to support "the US medical safety net and help close the specialty-care gap for 30 million patients." In the coming decades, Human Dx will work to expand the alliance globally "as it builds one open health system for all," the AMA said.
"Millions in this country and more than a billion people worldwide lack access to the healthcare they need, so they choose between paying for it themselves and being forced into poverty, or not getting it and becoming sicker or dying as a result," Jayanth Komarneni, founder and chair of Human Dx, said in a statement. "Thousands of doctors from over 70 countries are tired of this and have come together to build a solution. By contributing to Human Dx, doctors will expand access to help people get the care they need, beginning with the underserved: first here in America, and ultimately worldwide."
The AMA noted that since 2014 more than 6,000 doctors from more than 70 countries have helped collaboratively build Human Dx. They represent more than 40 medical specialties, and to date, they have generated more than 10 million clinical data points in the system.