Can crowdsourcing diagnose diseases better than doctors?

When people come together, they can solve difficult medical problems faster and more cheaply than the traditional clinical process. CrowdMed is a crowdsourced medical diagnosis platform. The company participated in the most recent Y Combinator class and launched publicly today at the TEDMED event in Washington, D.C. “The premise of the wisdom of crowds is that a large group of nonexperts can be very wise once you have the right mechanisms in place to aggregate their collective intelligence,” said founder Jared Heyman in an interview with VentureBeat. “Many people operate under the assumption that crowds are unwieldy, but they can be smarter than expert individuals. If I had to choose between one doctor and one random person on the street for a diagnosis, I would choose the doctor. But if I have to pick between one doctor and hundreds of people with relevant information to share, I would pick the crowd.” Heyman previously founded an online market research firm called Infosurv, where he experienced the power and accuracy of collective wisdom, and its capability to predict potential outcomes. In 2003, his sister got sick with an undiagnosed medical condition. She spent years going to specialist after specialist, but none of them could figure out what was wrong. By the time she was diagnosed with a rare disease that affects one in 15,000 women, she had seen 16 different doctors and racked up over $100,000 in medical bills. “This illness almost killed her — she lost three years of her life,” he said. “Many physicians are hyper-specialized these days and have a hard time seeing things outside of their speciality. This is a problem with the medical system, which meant my sister couldn’t get an accurate diagnosis. I thought there has to be an alternative between Google searches and WebMD and bouncing from doctor to doctor.” Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/16/yc-startup-bets-crowdsourcing-can-diagnose-diseases-better-than-doctors/#hGsPCAECGg37dpay.99 DreamIt Health, a new Philadelphia-based, health-focused chapter of incubator DreamIt Ventures, has announced its first class of ten startups. Independence Blue Cross (IBC) and Penn Medicine are sponsoring the class and Venturef0rth is providing the working space for the companies. The new accelerator was launched in December 2012. The startups will be provided with up to $50,000 in funding, office space, mentoring, and resources for developing and testing health-related products. The incubator will last four months, and companies will receive coaching from both entrepreneurs and health care executives. DreamIt Ventures has launched 80 companies over the past four years, including one health-related startup, 1DocWay. Supporting sponsors include global professional services company Towers Watson, and law firms Morgan Lewis, and Pepper Hamilton. In the FAQ section on DreamIt’s website, the company discusses the need for another health-specific incubator, explaining the health-specific resources DreamIt will provide startups. “For startups to be successful in healthcare, they need access to unusual resources typically out of reach – from … EMR systems to integrate with to big data sets of protected health information. In partnering with titans of industry such as Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross, we are opening up these resources to our companies,” the FAQ reads. Here are the ten startups: AirCare is developing an online and mobile app that will use video tele-nursing and patient analytics in an attempt to lower readmissions and improve patient outcomes. Biomeme is focused on creating a point-of-care molecular diagnostic device that is low-cost and mobile, to help clinicians and epidemiologists track infectious diseases in near-real time with smartphones. Fitly is an app that promotes healthier eating for kids with gamified mechanics. Families compete against one another to earn points by eating healthier foods, and Fitly provides meal plans, grocery lists, and even discounts. Winning families can win prizes up to and including cars and vacations, according to the company’s website. Grand Roundtable facilitates crowdsourcing for complex patient treatment solutions within a group of professionals, and provides doctors with easier means to compare patients’ electronic records to a database of similar patients from around the world. Medlio is an app that acts as a smart health insurance card, offering patients up-to-date information and providers more accurate front-end cost estimates. OnShift is developing a physician messaging platform for clinicians caring for the same patient which also incorporates care analytics. Osmosis is a web and mobile platform that uses a social learning framework to educate medical students, better preparing them to acquire and retain knowledge. MemberRx leverages electronic health records to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals by choosing the best generic or branded drug for a specific patient n a specific case. SpeSo Health is an analytics platform connecting patients with rare or complex diseases to online second opinions about their treatment or condition. Stat is a service aiming to speed up patient transport and lower costs by matching providers and payers with idle transportation resources. Source :http://mobihealthnews.com/21516/new-incubator-dreamit-health-launches-first-class/ The doctors expertise can also be crowdsourced: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2010/10/the_doctors_will_see_you_now.html Sometime in 1995, an e-mail from China arrived in my inbox with a desperate request for medical advice. I was a naïve medical student at Johns Hopkins University and an early adopter of the modem; the e-mail's author was identified only as "Peking University." In broken English, the message described a 21-year-old woman who had felt sick to her stomach and within days lost all her hair. This problem went away, but a few months later, "She Began to facial paralysis, central muscle of eye's paralysis, self-controlled respiration disappeared," and needed to be put on a ventilator. "This is the first time that Chinese try to find help from Internet," the message explained. "Please send back e-mail to us." With immature confidence I consulted some texts and replied that maybe she had a weird form of lupus. I never heard back and figured it was a prank. The following year at the supermarket, I was browsing the August issue of Reader's Digest and saw a piece titled "Rescue on the Internet." It turned out that I wasn't the only one who'd replied to the posting, and the whole thing had not been a hoax. Incredibly, hundreds of doctors had seen the brief message and correctly determined that the patient was being poisoned by a tasteless, odorless heavy metal called thallium. Soon after, Chinese doctors were able to give an antidote to save the woman's life. (She did end up permanently disabled.) In 2006, Wired magazine coined the term "crowdsourcing," to describe the process of seeking a problem's solution from a wide community, often online. Such collaboration certainly didn't come naturally to doctors. For millennia, they'd worked as solo practitioners who jealously guarded their secrets. But the Chinese e-mail episode shows how large groups of doctors might come together to solve a problem. More than 1,000 trained medical professionals independently guessed at the cause of the woman's illness, and while many were wrong, almost one-third suspected thallium poisoning. That was enough to get her doctors in China to consider the possibility and then confirm it. Advertisement In many ways, such crowdsourcing resembles an expert poll—sort of like Trident's claim that "four out of five dentists" recommend sugarless gum, minus the commercial bias. And it works. One example: the New England Journal of Medicine hosts a weekly, online "image challenge," which shows mysterious x-rays or biopsies and asks for a diagnosis via multiple-choice. I don't often pick the right answer, but if you look at the aggregate choices from tens of thousands of other doctors around the world, the plurality invariably hits the mark. Doctors in the United States have found help from their peers for real-life situations, too. Earlier this year, an internist (and sometime Slate author) named John Schumann posted the details of a peculiar case to a widely-read medical blog. A friend of his had developed inexplicable weight loss, low blood counts, and a weird, softball-sized mass in his liver. A dozen doctors saw the MRI scans and other test results online, and about half came up with the correct diagnosis: a benign growth of blood vessels. Debunking the myth of the lone maverick, health researchers suggest that groups of doctors outperform individuals not only in diagnosing problems but also in treating them. In 2007, NEJM began polling its readers for consensus opinions on tough treatment questions: how to handle an abnormal prostate cancer screening test, how to treat an athlete's skin infection, what to do for hepatitis C infection, and a few others. Responses from almost 20,000 doctors across the globe were tabulated. Still, patients may be uncomfortable turning over their care to a majority vote of faceless doctors. But the reality doesn't have to sound so scary and impersonal. In some cases, crowdsourcing works by soliciting many ideas, and then having designated subspecialists vet them. (As on Wikipedia, not all contributors are given equal authority.) At major medical centers, for example, a group of experts called a "tumor board" reviews tough cancer cases as a group, e-mails around the country for advice on the hardest ones, and then discusses the options with the individual patient. In my own field of pediatric cardiology, more than 1,500 doctors worldwide subscribe to an e-mail list for crowd-sourcing tough issues, but the final decisions are left to the cardiologist who knows the patient. Doctors can draw on group consults when necessary, but nonphysicians rarely have access to the power of crowd-sourced medicine. To be sure, many patients with complex or poorly understood medical problems like amyotrophic lateral sclerosiscongregate in large virtual communities such as PatientsLikeMe, where they share details of their medical treatments and symptoms with each other—and occasionally even launch their own unregulated and informal drug trials. These communities provide some helpful information and support for many people.