Monday, May 24, 2010

Crowdsourcing for a Cause

I just read an excellent article about crowdsourcing health care solutions by Eliot Van Buskirk atWired. The article, titled "Harvard-Based Crowdsource Project Seeks New Diabetes Answers," describes in great detail a new initiative to crowd source diabetes information with an end goal of curing Type I diabetes. (Almost 2.4 million people in the US suffer from Type I diabetes.) "Using federal stimulus funding from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Catalyst has teamed up with InnoCentive to explore whether open innovation and crowd-sourcing can spark new directions, collaborations and research in the healthcare community."

Congratulations to the National Institutes of Health for funding this and to Harvard's medical research department for developing this crowdsourced medical initiative sure to help those with Type I diabetes.

What's particularly interesting about the first phase of this project is the goal of ideation. The project's initial objective is not to identify a specific cure, but to start with the basic premises that there are questions or criteria that may not have been considered before now.

The study is awarding prizes ranging from $2,500 to $10,000 to anyone from experts to informed people who contribute the best answers. Should this be successful, it will continue with a new model for preliminary medical ideation and join a fine list of sites like patientslikeme.com and curetogether.com that are crowd sourcing medical innovations. Every day, the benefits the collective holds becomes clearer in everything from medical ideation to proxy clinical trials. (For a sound discussion of the merits of crowd sourcing, please see the following "How the Netflix Prize Was Won," also by Eliot Van Buskirk)

As this NIH-funded Harvard project moves forward with a potential second phase in crowdsourcing diabetes Type I treatment results, how great would it be for the project to talk to some of the sites who are already active in this area on a more clinical basis?

Originally published on Full Spectrum Blog Feb 16 2010


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