Glendale company aggregates data with an eye on rating medical professionals
A small team of programmers, doctors and marketers based in Glendale are hoping to transform the way public medical information is indexed, presenting masses of data into a straightforward report, independent of the industry’s influence.
The data platform is called MedFax and at the helm is founder and chief executive Gemma Cunningham, who is a medical marketing professional by trade. She was, for a while, the go-to expert connecting media to the healthcare industry when, for example, the public wanted to learn more about a celebrity overdose.
However, she became frustrated with how the medical industry was being evaluated by the public. She would even field endless calls from family members and friends hoping to find the right doctor. So she helped build MedFax to answer a nagging question: “Why isn’t there something where, at the touch of a button, I can get unbiased information on a physician?”
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MedFax’s operation is deceptively simple. Provide a system without the influence of the people it accounts for using only publicly available data aggregated from trusted sources to help insurers — and someday soon consumers — find the best doctor.
“When you have a bunch of facts, you just have facts. When you aggregate the facts, you start to create the ability to have intelligence,” Cunningham said. “Together, the facts tell us a story.”
The system monitors sources with more than 10 years’ worth of data on every physician in the United States including demographics and licensing as well as disciplinary and legal records.
The primary medical data sources often don’t communicate well, Cunningham said, and MedFax can help catch conflicting data from places such as medical boards, the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I knew this in doing medical [public relations] that all 75 state medical boards speak a different computer language, so nobody talks to each other,” Cunningham said. “So when a doctor gets in trouble, all he or she does is jump over to the next state and start another license or alternate licenses and no one ever knows.”
For example, state medical boards only record complaints or cases that have been finalized, but MedFax can access all 3,200 county courts in the United States and, in that way, inform insurers of pending cases, filling a data gap that might not be captured elsewhere.
Now in it’s fourth year, the notion of medical transparency in MedFax is rooted in Cunningham’s previous work founding the Assn. for Medical Ethics 12 years ago, which advocates that medical-device and pharmaceutical companies should report who they pay and how much.
Currently, MedFax’s core business is in aiding medical malpractice insurers. When a doctor searches for insurance, carriers use MedFax to whittle down key target metrics on physicians (such as the total number of lawsuits) and build a risk assessment.
Matt Bartilson, the company’s chief creative officer, met Cunningham while doing medical public relations himself and became interested in her vision. Bartilson said helping insurers by its very nature pushes healthcare in the right direction.
“The vast majority of doctors are providing really excellent care and, unfortunately, you can have a group of 20 doctors and one that is a higher risk,” Bartilson said. “[MedFax] helps identify that very quickly so that people can make decisions. And it’s really all about speeding up that decision-making process.”
For now, Cunningham is holding off on releasing a version of MedFax to the public until at least late next year. Because MedFax is the brainchild of those with years of experience in the medical industry, Cunningham said she is aware the data could be overwhelming.
“It has to be responsible and it has to be able to explain to the average person what the indexed data means. You can’t just dump on them 10 years of history,” Cunningham said.
“I also don’t think it’s fair to rate a doctor. You can’t evaluate your doctor the way you do a sandwich shop,” she added.
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Jeff Landa, jeff.landa@latimes.com
Twitter: @JeffLanda
