Launch HN: InpharmD (YC W21) – curated drug information for doctors

My name is Ashish, and I’m the CEO/ co founder of InpharmD (https://inpharmd.com). We take questions from doctors and return curated, evidence - based answers.

I was a clinical pharmacist offering a remote service from a University for 10 years. Ask us anything, we begged, and our team of pharmacists, residents, and students would look it up, get through the paywalls, and provide the answer.

I passed out business cards around local hospitals. They were lost over time.

Then I passed out business cards with magnets. They stuck around, but there aren’t that many places in the hospital with the magnetic surfaces.

Eventually, people stored our number, but we’d ask so many questions when they called, they couldn’t ask theirs: who are you, where are you calling from, what’s your email, spell it, etc, etc, etc. Often, they’d hang up on us, and I don’t blame them. The average doctor now sees five patients an hour.

I realized I wasn’t alone, and hundreds of other academicians, all leading their own teams, had the same problem. So, we formed a network and interviewed hundreds of our customers about how they’d ideally interact with us. What we needed to build was simple: one touch request.

My co - founder Tulasee built that and since, we learned that AI can transcribe PDFs faster (but not yet better) than our pharmacists. We started with 5,000 of our own study abstracts, assigned weights for corresponding content in their respective PDFs, and now we continuously reassign the weights until the algorithm can completely make our own abstracts. Our latest test revealed 94% accuracy against a matched human control, but with medical information, this will need to be 100% before we can rely on it.

We think Watson was a missed opportunity, so we called our algorithm Sherlock. We’re launching a partnership with the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists® (ASHP- https://ashp.org), using their database of 1,300 vetted drug monographs, so Sherlock can field questions at the point of care.

We’ve been fortunate to find early adopter health systems to pay for our service: WellStar, Ochsner, University of Maryland, Georgia DPH, and St Francis. We’re typically compared to the cost of their healthcare providers manually searching, and we end up cheaper.

We love this community and we’d welcome your ideas/ experiences/ feedback on what we’re building!

We built our own in house solution to this exact problem, but its maintained by our own clinical staff, it costs us north of $300k a year to maintain it! This only works of course because we have over 150 specialty pharmacies in our 'network' so we have volume to help keep up with costs.

I could honestly see us leveraging a solution like this at some point in the future, and probably anybody running fewer than 10 specialty pharmacies needs a solution like this.

Good luck to you guys!

Public data + our data shows only ~1/2 of clinical questions can be answered by Up to Date (or references like them).

Those online compendia employ a small team of credible authors + have massive scale, so they focus on the mainstream questions.

Our custom solution is designed around the long tail of emerging or complex questions.

For example, if you want to know about dexamethasone 4mg for early stage COVID, Up to Date will have it. But if you want to know about dexamethasone 20 mg, you’re faced with doing this literature search on PubMed (which = 2 hours + 4 journals) .

We get this question a lot, and really appreciate you surfacing it here. We made this into a FAQ for anyone that prefers to visualize it: https://www.inpharmd.com/faq

Maybe this is how any startup takes on any large incumbent? IDK. We love your collective wisdom, we learn a ton from you all.