AvoMD is a platform where users can create conversational agents as 'virtual clinical consults' to help clinicians make smarter and faster decisions at the point-of-care. AvoMD enables the seamless sharing of medical information with clinicians on the front-line to improve the care they provide, whether they are seeing patients in the clinic or the ICU. As a builder, you have the ability to share your knowledge with peers globally to change the way medicine is practiced. We welcome you to this noble effort and look forward to working with you along the way!

What is an AvoMD ALGO?

Think of an AvoMD ALGO as a virtual consult to a specialist. Other tools and platforms offer complex algorithms and pathways for diagnosis or management of various conditions, but our ALGOs are designed to be intuitive, conversational, and highly usable regardless of the scenario. Much like a consult in the real world, our ALGOs are designed to address specific questions related to clinical care and are in no way intended to take over routine management of a patient. These clinical questions can vary widely in their clinical acuity, care setting, and specialty of interest. For example, current ALGOs include “Interpretation of Arterial Blood Gas” results (often interpreted by pulmonology/critical care teams), “Anticoagulation for Prosthetic Heart Valves” (bread and butter for any cardiologist), and “Management of the Febrile Infant” (a daily occurrence for many pediatricians). Though many of these complex topics may warrant discussions with specialists, they are also clinical scenarios which are seen in the primary care setting and may be out of the realm of experience for the on-call clinician. Having validated resources available in your pocket or on your desktop, in a format that is intuitive to any clinician who has spent a day working in a hospital, is an important way to improve patient care. Our job as builders and designers is to make sure we cover these topics in a way that empowers clinicians and provides useful information at the point-of-care.

When Do You Need to Build an AvoMD ALGO?

AvoMD was designed to be applicable to a wide range of clinical problems and targets. While some targets are better addressed by AvoMD than conventional knowledge-sharing tools (e.g., Google Docs, PDFs, Wiki, physical cards), others may not be.

Clinicians assume an enormous 'knowledge burden' at the point-of-care, and AvoMD’s mission is to ease this burden by providing information and recommendations that are simple to understand and quick to apply. For example, it is not practical to read a 30-page 'Approach to hyponatremia' article in UpToDate to see a patient with ‘positive urine protein, known CKD, sodium 125, and fever,' as most of the article will not be relevant or applicable for this patient. Instead, clinicians can communicate with an AvoMD ALGO to receive targeted information without seriously disrupting their workflow. Additionally, these ALGOs provide a collection of tools including medical calculators, AI predictions, order sets, and note generators - so no more flipping between tabs or apps each time a patient walks into the room!

AvoMD is NOT Useful for Everything (For Now...)

As a conversational tool, each AvoMD ALGO tries to deliver an experience akin to a “user texting a specialist for a consult” on a complicated clinical issue. However, not all clinical problems are complex enough to require an ALGO. Here’s what we mean:

(1) How-to guides don’t need a consult

• How-to guides are crucial in the hospital, but often don’t need an ALGO or consult call to work through.
  • For example, an instructional "How to insert an arterial line to the left radial artery" could be a simple step-by-step description of the procedure. Of course, you can do this with AvoMD, but an AvoMD ALGO for this procedure may not be more effective than a simple Google Doc or a physical card.
  • Alternatively, "Approach to difficult IV access" could make an excellent AvoMD ALGO as the situation could be highly complex and require tailoring for each individual clinician’s use case

(2) Teaching is crucial, but make sure it is useful at point-of-care

• Description of generic information or overall medical systems is not a good use case for AvoMD ALGOs
• For example, an ALGO such as "Physiology of the Tubuloglomerular system" could be very informative, but is hard to use with a patient in the room
  • It is also unclear when to use this particular ALGO
• However, since renal physiology can be a key aspect to many clinical decisions, an ALGO such as "Approach to Acute Kidney Injury" can contain this information while still making it usable and easily accessible

(3) Short enough to be usable, long enough to be useful

• If the information can be contained within half a page of a Google Doc, it is probably not worth converting the information into an ALGO
  • Note: We might still be able to create an ALGO if the one-page document is highly summarized and there is another comprehensive source you can find