The Value of Openness: The PatientsLikeMe Blog

Last Friday (September 26, 2008), our Co-founder and President, Ben Heywood, was honored at the Boston Business Journal “Champions in Healthcare” award ceremony. Ben was one of two recipients recognized in the Innovation category. These regional awards highlight outstanding individuals and companies from the Boston-area who are making a difference in healthcare, including winners across five categories (Administrators, Community Outreach, Employers, Innovators, Nursing and Physicians).  Here is the full list of honorees.

Held at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, the event was kicked off with a keynote address by Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Leonard Zon, an internationally recognized pioneer in the fields of stem cell biology and cancer genetics.  Next, Boston Business Journal’s Editor, George Donnelly, and Lisa Vanderpool presented each honoree with an engraved, crystal award in front of a room full of colleagues, family members and friends.  The winners were also profiled in a special edition of the paper last month (August 15, 2008).

It’s truly an honor for our company to be spotlighted in this way, particularly in our own “backyard,” which happens to be populated with some of the best and brightest healthcare professionals and companies around.  In his thank-you remarks, Ben touched upon his personal experiences that has brought him here, and thanked his team and the community.  He said it best -  “I share this award with the other two co-founders, my brother Jamie and our friend Jeff Cole, and our incredible team…Last but not least, I have to thank the patients.  Without them, we wouldn’t be here.”

Ars Electronica - one of the foremost centers for art and technology - honored PatientsLikeMe at their annual festival with the Award of Distinction. The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most prestigious prizes in the fields of media, technology, animation, and interactive art.

This year, there were a record number of submissions with 4,056 overall.  More than 220 online communities were competing in the newest category: Digital Communities. Previous winners in this category include Wikipedia, Free Software Foundation and Akshaya.net.

While PatientsLikeMe has been honored and cited for its innovation in the area of health and medical research, we were thrilled to be recognized directly for our social and artistic value. Central to PatientsLikeMe, and what drew many of us to work here, is our commitment to empower individual patients to become informed, engaged participants in both their own healthcare and in the creation of new scientific knowledge. This prize attests to our contribution in this area.

At PatientsLikeMe, as an inter-disciplinary team of researchers, designers, and engineers, we are building a platform for patients to both share and use health data.  Our goal is help patients leverage their own experiences to make good decisions and improve outcomes.  As a research scientist here, it is exciting to see how our carefully designed tools engage patients to record, reason with and apply data to inform all types of medical decisions.

So, it was a particular honor for me to be able to travel on behalf of PatientsLikeMe to Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria to accept this award focused on the social and creative value of the online communities for patients. I presented PatientsLikeMe to an international audience and the audio is available as a podcast on their site. Relationships with these new audiences and the resulting discussions help us continue to improve tools for patients to share and leverage data to improve outcomes.