127 Figuring Out What Treatments Work Best For "Your Condition" Using AI and Crowdsourcing

After spending a decade endlessly searching online to help family members cope with medical conditions. Yael Elish (a core member of the Waze founding team) found that... time and again, other people were the key to discovering the most effective treatments.

An idea was born...StuffThatWorks helps people learn which treatments work best for their condition using smart, AI-based crowdsourcing. You know your condition best. How it feels. What aggravates it. Which treatments work. (And which ones don’t.)

Talking Points:
-Symptoms are indicative of a condition.
-300-400 treatments per condition.
-Stuff That Works is empowering people to share their experiences.
-Patients have real-world information in the medical world.
-The age of onset for chronic illnesses is dropping dramatically.
-50%-90% of the time patients can diagnosis themselves. Compare that with John Hopkin's diagnosis rate of 27%.

TOGETHER WE ARE BETTER
Most of us dealing with a chronic condition spend hours online searching for better treatments because we feel no one has properly researched which treatments will work best for people like us. We’re right: nobody’s doing it, even for the most common or serious conditions, let alone more mundane or rare ones. It’s just too expensive to conduct large-scale patient interviews, and most medical research is done on very small groups of people. The result? The treatments we get are far from being optimized for us.

ENTER CROWDSOURCING
Just like Wikipedia, Waze or Kickstarter, when people come together for a common cause the result can be huge. We should be driving the research about our condition: we know how treatments affect us, and collectively we have more information than any organized research could ever gather. Together, we can build the world’s richest and most up-to-date database for treatment effectiveness, and use it to learn more about our condition— underlying causes, patterns in symptoms, comorbidities, and which treatments work best for each of us.

HOW IT WORKS
People dealing with chronic conditions share their experience in an organized survey. This data is then normalized, anonymized and analyzed using advanced machine learning algorithms that are programmed to look for valuable insights—for the entire condition community, for subgroups and for individuals. The insights are shared with the community, where members can comment, discuss and pose new research questions.

Link: 

Figuring out together which treatments work best

Sponsors:

Envita Medical Center: Envita Medical Center: A Center of Excellence for Personalized Oncology and Lyme Disease Treatment located in Scottsdale, AZ. What defines Envita is the undeniable truth that every patient who has the courage to come to Envita and walk through our doors, discovers the incredible healing and compassionate care that can only exist in a clinic that is radically focused on patient outcomes;... they provide a focused team of people with an exceptional heart for serving our patients. At Envita they have discovered a revolutionary solution for patients to help improve their quality of life. Call to speak with one of their patient care coordinators today. (Ep. #80 for more info)

Link:

Envita Medical Center

Medical Bill Gurus The experts at Medical Bill Gurus are dedicated to innovative solutions for any medical billing scenario. Their patient advocates are available to help reduce medical bills and assist patients with navigating a dynamic health landscape. They take pride in speaking with patients every d