From May 2013 to April 2015, Boston-based startup CrowdMed completed sleuthing for 397 medical mystery cases. These cases involved patients who had previously visited a median of five physicians and incurred a median of $10,000 in medical bills but experienced little help by way of an actionable diagnosis. A new study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research has evaluated CrowdMed's results for those hundreds of cases in order to determine the impact of the company's service.
About half of the patients making up the 397 cases reported they would recommend the service to a friend, and nearly 60 percent reported the CrowdMed diagnostic process, which crowdsources medical expertise from a range of professionals that patients may otherwise not have access to, gave them insights that led them closer to a correct diagnosis.
The authors concluded that although patients report overall positive improvements associated with use of CrowdMed's platform, further development of crowdsourcing methods to facilitate diagnosis requires longer-term evaluation.