ApexMD is a search utility that provides useful information to patients, primary care physicians and other medical professionals who are looking to make referrals or find other information about highly specialized physicians at tertiary care hospitals and academic medical centers. We differ from typical physician directories in that we allow our users to search for relevant physicians by entering a specific disease or procedure rather than just viewing a list of doctors grouped by specialty.

ApexMD was launched in 2008 by husband and wife physicians, Dr. Wade Smith and Dr. Janeen Smith, who are dedicated to improving the cumbersome and disorganized process by which patients find or are referred to specialist physicians at tertiary care or other major medical centers. For many years, Drs. Smith & Smith have experienced, first hand, the difficulties associated with finding relevant specialists from each end of the spectrum of care: Janeen as a generalist physician practicing in a community hospital in Marin, California and Wade as a highly specialized vascular neurologist practicing at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, one of the nations top hospitals. Drs. Smith and Smith realized that if it was difficult for them, even with their inside knowledge and connections, to find relevant physicians for specific diseases at tertiary care medical centers it must be extremely frustrating for other referring physicians and patients.

Drs. Smith and Smith concluded that what was needed was a searchable database that catalogued physicians disease by disease and procedure by procedure. They observed that, although specialist physicians typically can be associated with many diseases and many procedures, there are some specific diseases or procedures for which they have a closer or even very tight association. Generally, these diseases or procedures are ones that fall within the physician’s area of concentration, or subspecialty.

In early 2007, using the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database as a starting point, Drs. Smith and Smith began creating a massive catalogue of over 8,000 diseases and procedures and mapped all of them to relevant specialties and subspecialties. Along the way, they had assistance from nearly 20 other physician colleagues with expertise in various specialties. The result of this work is ApexMD, which was launched in October 2008, to assist patients, primary care physicians or other medical professionals in finding relevant specialists for specific diseases or procedures and to make the referral process more efficient and accurate.

Our physician profiles are created and mapped to our disease and procedure catalogue by a web crawling process, much of which is automated although some human intervention is occasionally required. We are constantly working to add more physicians to our database with the goal of ensuring maximum coverage of correctly profiled specialist physicians. You can assist us in this effort. If you are a physician with a profile in our database and you would like to change or refine your profile please search for your profile using our name search capability on our home page.

When you locate your profile please click ‘Is This You?’ at the bottom of your profile. An email will be launched. Please send the email to us using your official medical center email account in order to assist us in verifying your identity. Once your identity has been verified, we will send login credentials so that you can modify your ApexMD profile. If you are a physician that is not currently in our database and you would like to add your profile to ApexMD please complete our Physician Sign-Up process. It only takes a few minutes to build a profile.

We also welcome medical centers or physician group practices that would like to contact us about adding large numbers of physicians through a data file import. Join us in helping to build the most comprehensive search engine for finding relevant physicians for specific diseases or procedures.

Source: ApexMD and Emphasis Search, Inc.