Got a particularly challenging medical case or a data-intensive project? The answer to your problems may lie in the crowd.
Indeed, a recent partnership between CrowdFlower, a developer of crowd microtasking services, and CrowdMed, a startup launched at this year's TEDMED conference circuit, could bring the power of the public to the doctor's office or lab.
The partnership between the two San Francisco-based companies, announced in August, allows CrowdMed to use the CrowdFlower Platfom to submit its medical diagnoses to "the crowd." That crowd takes data from a patient-submitted questionnaire – which includes symptoms, medical history, family medical history, basic demographics, medications and lifestyle – and creates diagnostic suggestions that are analyzed and organized by moderators, than submitted to the patient as suggestions (each with an estimated probability of accuracy) to discuss with one's doctor.
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Tim Matthews, CrowdFlower's chief marketing officer, says crowdsourcing "has to be explained" to healthcare executives, but he believes the concept has a bright future in healthcare. Aside from using it to tackle complex or confusing medical cases, he says, crowdsourcing has been used over the past two years by CrowdFlower in medical transcription, recruiting and medical imaging, where it's used for everything from identifying images to counting the number of cells.
"We can take a very large and complex job and break it down into small chunks (and) tasks," Matthews said in an interview last month with mHealth News. "There's a lot of data out there that can be identified and sorted," a task that's often left to overworked medical professionals or academicians. "We can help with that work. We've only barely scratched the surface in showing what we can do."
Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower's CEO, called the use of his company's product to help suffering people "truly inspirational," in a prepared statement. “One of the most rewarding aspects of running CrowdFlower is seeing the innovative and wonderful applications of crowdsourcing our customers dream up."
To be clear, crowdsourcing doesn't necessarily mean farming out a task to whoever happens to be online at the time – and someone's medical problem won't be perused by a bored housewife in Alabama or a 13-year-old gamer in Michigan. CrowdMed relies on a stable of hundreds of "medical detectives" (MDs), while CrowdFlower's tasks are overseen by "crowdsourcing professionals" to ensure that the final project meets a rigid set of standards. And Matthews points out that any patient data is de-identified.
CrowdFlower, which launched roughly three years ago and now includes AT&T, eBay, Ford, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Sears, Thomson Reuters, Toshiba and Twitter as clients, recently updated its crowdsourcing platform for large-scale data projects, which Matthews feels will appeal to the medical research community in particular. Already the company is working with Harvard University on a tuberculosis project, using crowdsourcing to help identify and chart neurons in images.
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One specific healthcare application for crowdsourcing was demonstrated at the 9th Annual Games for Health conference this past June in Boston. Among the "games" demonstrated was EyeWire, an online competition launched in December 2012 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which some 70,000 participants from 100 countries are helping to map connections in neurons to develop a 3-D portrait of a single cell.
The project, which could one day be used to help scientists solve the mysteries of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease or even cancer, would take years to complete if left up to the researchers at MIT. Instead, using the power of the crowd, researchers said they hope to have a routine down whereby cells can be mapped out in one year's time, if not quicker.
Just one more reason to bite your tongue when your spouse or child is spending a lot of time surfing the Web. He or she may be helping to solve a medical mystery.
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