Crowdsourcing the answers to medical mysteries

By Daniel Gaitan NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For people plagued for years by mysterious illnesses, a new online service aims to help by “crowdsourcing” among medical professionals for a diagnosis. The service, called CrowdMed (www.crowdmed.com), relies on retired doctors, nurses and other “medical detectives” to help patients find answers to their hard-to-diagnose medical conditions. Jared Heyman, the founder of CrowdMed, told Reuters Health, “We’ve been live for 15 months, and more than 50 percent of our patients tell us that their case was successfully solved.” Heyman was inspired to launch CrowdMed after watching his sister suffer from a chronic undiagnosed medical condition and rack up nearly $100,000 in medical bills. Today CrowdMed has nearly 2,000 active medical detectives.



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