Guest posting by Jesal Shah
How is crowdsourcing’s role in medical care different from the ePatient community, which similarly leverages the internet population to provide services, information and support? Personally, crowdsourcing and its medical applications inspired strong connections to the ePatient movement currently shaping the health care delivery system. However, delving into each more closely, I realized subtle, but significant departures in their overall mission and function.
Crowdsourcing Medical Diagnoses
Jared Heyman, founder of CrowdMed, an online platform that crowdsources medical diagnoses, highlights the value of the “wisdom of crowds” and believes “large groups of non-experts can collectively be much wiser than individual experts.” This platform has two primary members: patients and medical detectives. It creates an incentivized system empowering the “crowd” to research and provide suggestions for the medical condition to the patient.
Patient Process: 2
Medical Detective Process: 2
ePatient Community1.3
The ePatient community places strong emphasis on patient empowerment. It promotes greater patient/caregiver involvement in medical information dissemination and reception as well as clinical care decision-making and treatment process. There are many online list-servs that push the patient to take action, plan ahead, be informed and shape the definition of quality in medicine. (ACOR.org, a ePatient portal for patients with cancer, is shown below.)
Mission and Function: Similarities and Differences
Both movements have been enabled by the online community and heightened by involvement of lay individuals in their own health as well as the medical system. The medical detectives who work to provide diagnoses are not required to possess medical education nor is their formal training, outside of personal experience, for e-patients providing insights on care and treatment. Neither movement is anti-doctor. Moreover, both instead envision themselves as supplementary tools; nonetheless, crowdsourcing more directly plays the role of doctor. Its platform somewhat resembles an online virtual doctor game where each person can play physician, with the best receiving the prize. This is illustrated through the following image of a medical detective’s web page.
The primary objective of crowdsourcing medical diagnoses is very technical; in contrast, while the ePatient movement provides information on expert topics, it also plays an emotional support role. In most cases, a physician is inherently limited by not directly experiencing the challenges of a particular illness; thus, by allowing a patient to share his experiences as well as hear of others undergoing similar trials, a patient can improve his or her psychological and social wellbeing. Not to mention, the ePatient movement is rethinking quality in healthcare delivery and patient-doctor experiences in terms of a patient-centric vision with direct patient input. It clearly extends beyond an interaction with medical knowledge and other technical matters. Overall, both movements are clearly reshaping the medical field in similar and unique ways; it will be interesting to see how these two fields converge or diverge going forward.
References:
1. DeBronkart, Dave. “How the E-patient Community Helped save My Life: An Essay by Dave DeBronkart.” British Medical Journal (2013): n. pag. Web.
2. https://www.crowdmed.com/
3. http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/epatients-empowered-patients.html