Social Medicine 2.0—Can You Use Crowdsourcing to Give Your Medical Device a Leg Up?

Learn about the crowdsourcing resources available to patients, health care practitioners, and medical device designers seeking to gather data and contribute to solving medical challenges.

Online crowdsourcing communities are a game changer. These platforms allow anyone to appeal to the entire connected world for support or participation. They get many of us to participate—Kickstarter processed just shy of $500 million dollars in 2014. Most interesting, at least to me, are platforms for crowdsourcing information. These make up the next generation of online forums, ranging from chat forums to open source hardware development.

Nigel SyrotuckWhen it comes to medical information, open settings are probably not a wise choice for reliability, but there is a slew of other platforms designed to encourage experienced contributors to respond to appeals for help. This article will discuss a few interesting crowdsourcing resources available to patients, health care practitioners, and medical device designers seeking to gather data and contribute to solving medical challenges.

Several online platforms allow anyone in the world to login and crowdsource medical advice. As discussed, Facebook probably isn’t a great place to start—unless you want to organize a stop at the pub on your way to the hospital. Other platforms, such as CrowdMed or QuestionDoctors.com, allow you to post your problem to their website and offer a reward or get responses for free, respectively (both sites only allows certain people to respond to these ‘cases’). Patientslikeme is a website for crowdsourcing health management information to be used by a patient after they have received their diagnosis...