The Doctor of the Future... uses SimulConsult

Fast Company has a particularly good article (The Doctor of the Future) on how physicians are innovating to reduce costs, improve quality and broaden access.SimulConsult is described in some depth on page 4

Dr. Michael Segal, 54, a renowned pediatric neurologist in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, has been working on [rare disease diagnosis] for 20 years. The result: SimulConsult, a sophisticated online crowd-sourcing tool for identifying neurological disorders that demonstrates the potential of the Web to transform the way all kinds of diseases are diagnosed. Doctors enter a patient's symptoms and test results, and the software produces likely diagnoses and the probability for each...Segal recognized the need for such a tool as a resident in the 1980s, when he spent hours poring through books and looking at every possible unusual disease for one particularly perplexing patient. "The problem is that textbooks are arranged so if you know the disease, they tell you the symptoms or lab results," he says. "But patients come to us in the opposite way, with findings that we need to put together in a story to reach a diagnosis."

I'm quoted describing how it takes a long time for medical innovations to reach the market.