The healthcare experiences of our friends and family members guide us with everything from diets to the doctors and treatments we choose. But a Massachusetts company believes that sharing such experiences more widely can be a valuable research platform that could help drive improvements in medical products and services.
In this TEXDx talk, Rishi Bhalerao reports how the traditional top-down healthcare system tunes out volumes of information from patients who deal with medical and health issues every day. The idea of PatientsLikeMe is to make the system more interactive and collaborative.
For example, in a few months, the fast-growing patient network created the world's largest open registry of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) patients online. As more people with different health conditions join the network, the likelihood increases that their shared experiences will contribute important new insights into what we know about our heath and care.