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This is the problem More Detail Full Account	Medical costs in the USA are the world's highest and accelerating at an estimated 15% this year. (16.5% of GDP vs some 8.5% in most other developed countries) Even so, the quality of healthcare in the USA is poor and one of the major reasons is the inadequate quality of clinical decision making according to the US Govt Washington Institute of Medicine report this year. 'It's taking up to 17 years for new developments in medicine to make their way into average clinical practice.' Poor clinical decision making is a major contributor to health costs, estimated at a third of the health budget ($400 B) according to Dr Donald Berwick, head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and one of the USA's leading spokesmen.
This is the current response More Detail Full Account	There is consensus on what is needed from WIM and all major commentators. We need a way for doctors to be up to date with scientific medicine. We need consumers to be able to be fully informed about all the clinical issues and options that face them not just given background information. We need joint clinical decision making between doctors and consumers.
Why it doesn't work - what's really going on More Detail Full Account	The net seems like it should be providing all the necessary information but extensive research shows it is failing completely on both the consumer and the professional fronts though for quite different reasons. More than 30,000 consumer net sites are all built on the passive patient model - only background information is being provided not current clinical decision making information and even this has a fault rate greater than 40%. There are only a few professional sites which bring ‘truckloads’ of information usually from just one of the various categories of professional resources. They fail because the doctor still has the huge job of condensing and collating all this information from the various resources with his own personal database. The net hasn’t solved the information management problem for the doctor.
The WisDoc Response (How to fix it - design) More Detail Full Account	WisDoc approaches both the above issues together from a completely new angle. It provides a specialist distilled research database for doctors (50-300 articles per topic) that is current to within two weeks of the publication edge. It provides a highest common language inter-specialty text that is current to within four weeks of the research publication edge. The text is drawn from all of the professional resource categories : medicine, surgery, preventive care. It provides a corresponding consumer translation of the above professional text in high school level English that is current to within six weeks of the research publication edge.
The WisDoc Response (How to fix it - construction) More Detail Full Account	WisDoc has developed many design efficiencies to enable the above task to be carried out swiftly and economically. e.g., it selects the twenty most important diseases in the developed world for the initial project but this still covers >90% of the major disease burden.
How to fund it More Detail Full Account	WisDoc’s revenue in the first instance will be generated by licensing the service to HMOs, Health insurance companies and Medical indemnity insurance companies. The service offers these companies both the opportunity for major cost savings (very much greater than the cost of licensing the service), an attractive marketing service to their clients and a huge boost to the quality of clinical care provided. Some of the major insurers are already trying to move in the direction of the WIM recommendations. e.g, the Minnesota insurers group. The limitation is the lack of a current design solution and particularly one which will ensure a shift in clinical decision making behaviour.