Can Social Healthcare Replace Clinical Trials?

Every day, data is lost between the clinician-patient interaction. Given the fact that physicians under report over 50% of the symptoms and side effects their patients experience, this is a significant amount of information. This is data that could otherwise be used to formulate new pharmaceutical drugs or design innovative medical devices. In this interview with Ben Heywood, we learn how PatientsLikeMe.com is creating a new medium for clinical trials by crowdsourcing healthcare data from their community of patients.

PatientsLikeMe was co-founded in 2004 by three MIT engineers: brothers Benjamin and James Heywood and longtime friend Jeff Cole. Five years earlier, their brother and friend Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) at the age of 29. The Heywood family soon began searching the world over for ideas that would extend and improve Stephen’s life. Inspired by Stephen’s experiences, the co-founders and team conceptualized and built a health data-sharing platform that potentially can transform the way patients manage their own conditions, change the way industry conducts research, and improve patient care.

Interview Highlights with Ben Heywood

• What is PatientsLikeMe.com?

• Why do patients openly share their health status through PatientsLikeMe.com and what do they hope to gain in return?

• How is the medical community responding to clinical data from PatientsLikeMe?

• The unique business model of PatientsLikeMe.com.

• The short and long term vision for PatientsLikeMe and the future impact of social healthcare.

• What has Ben learned since the inception of PatientsLikeMe?