‘Grand Round Table’ software gets complicated diagnoses right 70%

Local health IT startup Grand Round Table is developing software that helps doctors make complicated diagnoses.

Its first partner? Einstein Medical Center‘s award-winning team of internal medicine residents. The team has won three consecutive national Jeopardy-style medical challenges.

Grand Round Table, one of the several DreamIt Health startups that remained in Philly after the accelerator ended, is testing its software at the team’s practice sessions, where Einstein residents test their knowledge in making challenging diagnoses, Dr. House-style.

About 70 percent of the time, Grand Round Table is getting the diagnosis right, said founder Eric King. Sometimes, the startup’s software gets the correct diagnosis earlier than the team, he said. Grand Round Table is able to make diagnoses for just more than a half of the cases that the Einstein residents look at because some of the cases are centered around symptoms that Grand Round Table doesn’t have data on.

So how does it work?

The app parses electronic health records to bring up relevant past conditions, as well as about 8 million medical articles from the federal government’s publicly-available PubMed.

Sure, a doctor could do that research on their own but it could take hours or days, King said. Grand Round Table makes it so that “doctors don’t have to dig.”

The startup is also getting content from McGraw-Hill to add to the tool’s data repository, as well as using 20 million Independence Blue Cross anonymized claims to test the tool. Grand Round Table got access to that IBC data in part because of IBC’s role in DreamIt Health, King said.

The startup raised $110,000 from Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners and other investors and plans to pilot the tool at private practices, King said. The end-goal is to have hospitals pay a subscription fee for the service, but hospital bureaucracy is one current barrier to that.

King, 30, left med school at Jefferson University five years ago to pursue healthcare IT. He lives in Northern Liberties and works out of Indy Hall. The startup currently employs one other staffer full-time — cofounder John Schaeffer — and is hiring one more.