www.lupus.physiciansforpatients.com

We originated as a group of doctors dedicated to helping people online in a way to improve accessibility. There a lot of people that have limited access to health care (can’t find a specialist in their area, long wait times, etc.). This way it is easier for a smaller number of physicians to help a larger number of people.

The web format in which we are doing this is through an online support community with a dedicated physician on the site to answer questions for patients

Dr. Shanahan is the doctor. He is board certified in Rheumatology and  trained at Duke University

In addition, we will be incorporating 'health trackers' soon! This tool can be used by the patients to track their symptoms and to see what may be contributing to them.

Physicians for Patients will also be looking for associations (trends in complex data sets of the cumulative data collected in this large community of patients. This is done in an automated anonymous manner). This is the exciting part! Our hope is to identify correlations between symptoms, daily activities, medications, and the environment. This will help us to better understand Lupus and hopefully to guide us to new potential treatments.

I would be happy to set up a webinar to take you through the site and to tell you more about what we are doing. We are trying to get a large number of people involved. In order for us to make some new head way into better understanding lupus through identifying new correlations we need quite a large number of people to participate.