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Posts from the ‘Crowdsourcing’ Category

May 8

2 Comments

Figure 1: The Flickr of Healthcare Professionals

There are more and more ways for crowdsourcing clinical questions, and the newest addition to the family of web tools and services is Figure 1, a photo sharing site for healthcare professionals. Registered physicians can share images, learn from others and bookmark useful cases.

I’m not sure this is what the medical community requires right now, but I’m always curious about further developments.

According to the co-founder, Joshua Landy, MD:

“I developed Figure 1 because I wanted a safe way to share medical images with the medical community, while protecting patients’ privacy.”

fig1

Apr 22

6 Comments

When a Patient is in Control of His Health: Posting ECG Results on Twitter

Hugo Campos is well known in the health 2.0/e-patient communities and now he made another step forward in changing healthcare. Even though I teach medical students not to give medical advice online, this little story should give us a glimpse about the near future of healthcare. He posted his ECG results (with AliveCor) on Twitter asking the opinion of cardiologists.

Earlier tonight, at around 7:25 pm, I noticed a fluttering sensation in my chest. My first thought was atrial fibrillation (AF). I’ve had quite a few runs of AF, so I’m familiar with its symptoms. I immediately grabbed my iPhone ECG recorder, licked the electrodes (I know, gross, but I wanted a sharp recording), lifted my shirt and placed the device against my chest hoping for a clean recording. Until now, I hadn’t been fast enough to catch an arrhythmia in action. But this time, I caught the tail end of the episode. I tweeted the experience.

a

Apr 22

1 Comment

A Crowdsourcing Solution for Clinical Problems: New Smartphone App

Prognosis, which I covered before, just came up with a new application that aims at assisting medical professionals in crowdsourcing clinical problems. It differs pretty much from HealthTap as patients are not involved with this and the community is international.

The app links you to a community of medical professionals who help out each other by answering questions and clarifying doubts via their hard earned experience and academic excellence.

In order to provide a conducive, respectful platform to share questions and clarify doubts, all users are obliged to adhere to a code of conduct and thus be courteous.

q_app_web_minimalistic

Jan 28

5 Comments

Crowdsourcing practical sessions in a university course focusing on social media?

I’ve been teaching medical students about using social media for years at two medical schools and through a digital format as well. These courses consisted of series of extended Prezi.com lectures, written exam and constant online communication with students discussing their questions on Facebook and a blog.

The challenge I face now it that I try to include more practical sessions (tasks they have to do online after each lecture) in the course, and I’m wondering what these may be. Any suggestions?

The Social MEDia Course main page

Jan 8

Let’s crowdsource the doctor now!

There is an amazing and moving story on Paul Levy’s blog about an ex-soldier who got wounded in Israel and an American doctor saved his eye sight. He would like to thank the doctor but could never track her down. Maybe we could.

 In 1973, 20-year-old Boaz Tamir was the leader of a defensive tank group on the Golan Heights in Israel when the Syrians attacked.  In the course of the battle, he was blinded by shrapnel and taken to the closest hospital for treatment.*  That small hospital was in Tiberias and ordinarily would not have had an eye specialist present.  But a young American doctor who had been visiting one of the Jerusalem hospitals for clinical rotations was assigned to this hospital in the periphery.  It turns out she was very adept at eye surgery and was able to remove the metal particles, and he recovered his eyesight.

Because Boaz left in such a hurry, he never had a chance to thank the doctor.  He later tried to track her down but was unable to find her.

To sum it up, we are looking for a doctor who did her clinical rotation in a small hospital in Tiberias in 1973. Please share this message.

Dec 3

Crowdsourcing the method for crowdsourcing

A few months ago, I described a project in which a husband tried to crowdsource the diagnosis of his wife. They received so many ideas about the potential diagnosis, that in a new Innocentive campaign they are trying to crowdsource the method with which this huge amount of data could be analyzed.

If you have ideas about it, please join their community!

On August 13, 2012, we launched an InnoCentive Brainstorm Challenge with an unusual goal: to crowdsource a definitive medical diagnosis for a patient whose case has stymied doctors at Stanford, Harvard and the National Institute of Health. More than 1500 Solvers joined our challenge, generating 108 pages of hypotheses for our team of specialists to evaluate. Now, we are returning to ask the Solver community to join us on our new challenge: help us to define the next phase of our journey, to bring us closer to our goal of reaching a definitive diagnosis.

inno

Sep 27

3 Comments

A Brain Cancer and Its Open Data: The Cure Through Crowdsourcing

Salvatora Laconesi is an Italian man who recently found out he has brain cancer. Being a good coder, he cracked the code of his medical records and made the data open source so then anyone can analyze it (researchers, medical professionals, artists, etc.). This is the approach ePatient Dave regularly talks about: Let Patients Help!

Here is what happened to him:

  • I have a brain cancer.
  • I went to get my digital medical records.
  • Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format.
  • I cracked them.
  • Shared them with everyone.
  • 2 of them already replied.
  • Grab the information about my disease, if you want, and give me a CURE: create a video, an artwork, a map, a text, a poem, a game, or try to find a solution for my health problem.
  • This is a CURE. This is my OPEN SOURCE CURE.

Aug 7

A New Mystery Awaits Crowdsourcers!

Since my recent keynote (A Geek Doctor Crowdsources Medicine) was published, I’ve been getting requests to find/crowdsource a diagnosis. Just take a look at the mystery of a mum I’ve been writing about in the past couple of days.

Now here is a new mystery. My advice was to present the details on a blog or a wiki. The case is quite interesting, if you have any tips about the diagnosis, please let them know about that on the blog. Thank you!

Aug 6

1 Comment

A Geek Doctor Crowdsources Medicine: Video

My recent keynote at the Doctors 2.0 and You event in Paris got a new, catchy title. I talked about how I met the old structures of medical communication and education as a geek and what kind of solutions I implemented through crowdsourcing.

Aug 2

Mom’s Medical Mystery: Turning to SLE?

A few days ago, I described the medical mystery of a mother in details and how the husband and now more and more doctors try to help find the diagnosis through crowdsourcing. They created a wiki for listing the potential hypotheses so then anyone can leave comments on them easily.

After ruling out Pheo, they now turn to SLE. What do you think about this?

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