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CrowdMed wants to bring crowdsourcing to medicine
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Star Tribune/San Jose Mercury News


Star Tribune/San Jose Mercury News, May 10, 2014
Posted: October 8th, 2014
http://www.startribune.com/business/258540431.html

What Wikipedia has done for knowledge, a San Francisco company called CrowdMed is betting it can do for medicine. Send your symptoms and a nominal fee to CrowdMed.com, and dozens of medical professionals, students and average Joes will crowdsource that is, share their knowledge and expertise to help diagnose whats wrong with you. The company isnt out to replace your family doctor, but instead take advantage of the reach of social media to tap into an age-old medical practice: seeking second opinions. Or, in this case, hundreds of them. At the UC-Berkeley/UC-San Francisco Joint Medical Program, Dr. Amin Azzam, director of the problem-based learning curriculum, wants to use CrowdMed to push the boundaries of how we train medical students. Instead of teaching first- and second-year students with pretend patients, as is done now, Azzam is proposing adding CrowdMeds cases to the curriculum. They might even be more motivated to learn because its a real patient, he said. Within 90 days of a consumer putting a case online, CrowdMeds algorithm generates a list of the most probable diagnoses submitted by its medical detectives, along with their explanations. Patients are asked to give those suggestions to their physicians for consideration. Once its confirmed that the suggestions were helpful, the patients are refunded their $50 deposit and the detective who made the correct diagnosis gets his or her reward.

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