Platform harnesses the crowds to solve rare disease cases

We recently saw Israel’s Medivizor platform aim to provide web users with more accurate health data than they would get with a simple Google search. Now CrowdMed is relying on the knowledge of a broad set of people in order to find out the potential causes of rare diseases. When doctors aren’t familiar with the symptoms their patients have, this can be down to the fact that their condition isn’t a common one. Rather than relying on one knowledgeable source, CrowdMed hopes to employ the help of the crowds to answer patient’s questions that their GP can’t. Currently in beta, the site encourages users to sign up and browse the unsolved cases. By aggregating the “collective wisdom” of its userbase – which includes medical experts and researchers – the site aims to provide patients with a number of possibilities that they can present to their doctor on their next visit. According to the company, CrowdMed also uses “patented prediction market technology” to deliver the most relevant results to its users. By opening up complex medical problems to a larger community of people who may hold the key to the problem, CrowdMed has already helped accurately diagnose 20 real-life patient cases, as well as saving over USD 4 million in healthcare costs for those who otherwise may have been shuttled between doctors without a solution. Are there other ways to help those with rare diseases?