“We’re just getting started on a long road to really impact your individual disease and your quality of life…”

Each week this month, we’ll be posting a video interview with a member of the PatientsLikeMe executive team.  You’ll hear from Ben Heywood, Jamie Heywood, David S. Williams and Paul Wicks, Ph.D. about what the recent changes to PatientsLikeMe mean for patients, research, industry and the entire medical establishment.

Today, listen in to hear what Ben has to say about why we’re on this “road,” what has been improved with the recent upgrades and how sharing your own health journey moves us forward.  You can also see last week’s video teaser here.

“Social media is the canvas on which patients can really paint the entire picture of the experience they’re having with their disease and how it impacts their lives.” - David Williams

Why is it so important for patients and industry to work together?  Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Business Development David Williams tells us just that in this week’s installment of “A Look Ahead.”  We sat down to discuss the benefits of aligning patient and industry interests as well as the role that social media can play.

Among other win-win results, David shared that this alignment of interests can produce:

• Faster development of treatments and services
• Products that impact a patient’s quality of life, not just clinical outcomes
• Greater patient influence and input on industry decisions

We also talked about how social media has become a key method of interaction, allowing pharmaceutical and other healthcare companies to better understand the functional impact of a disease on everything from mental productivity to the ability to stay employed.  Patients like you discuss issues like these online every day, and if the industry is paying attention, it can lead to richer data and improved services.

What successes has PatientsLikeMe had in bringing patients and industry together?  And what kind of possibilities do we see ahead?  Tune in to David’s full interview here:

Thanks for stopping by and listening to the second podcast in the “A Look Ahead” series. Next Friday, April 1, 2011, we will be talking with Co-Founder and Chairman Jamie Heywood about the transition from drug safety to patient safety. See you then!

Patients like you with life-changing conditions have to make choices every day, just like anyone else. These choices, however, typically have more at stake than how to RSVP to a party or even whether to walk away from an “underwater” home. For patients like you, your lives may be at stake.

I have watched my mother deal with three different types of cancers for more than 25 years, and the choices she had to make for me and my siblings to be successful were stark. As a single mother with a doctorate and two master’s degrees, she had to take jobs that paid less because cancer limited her energy. She took on enormous debt because she wouldn’t let her illness stop her from giving her children a private school education. Those choices started from physical and emotional hardship, then led to economic hardship.

Patients like you – and like my mother – have conditions you didn’t ask for, and your ability to keep a job and maintain economic stability isn’t just based on your talent or training, but also in your management of your conditions. Brought on by infection, age, genetic pre-disposition or unknown causes, these conditions factor into every choice, every decision—and in my mother’s case, which job to seek. We all make choices each day, but patients like you often have to choose between living well and just living.

One of the most important choices for patients like you is how to treat your disease. With your health care team, you try to make the best choice with the given information. The problem is information is scarce, untrustworthy or impersonal. That’s right, impersonal. What is a miracle treatment for one person could land another in the hospital. At PatientsLikeMe, we try to shine light on the information that can help each of you reach your best outcome. This is why we don’t just provide aggregate information, but allow you to access the profile of a person who is taking a medication to see if that person is “like you.”

The figure below speaks to the choices patients like you have to make about your treatments in a world with imperfect information. The chart depicts thousands of patient evaluations of efficacy and tolerability among major therapies across our 22 represented conditions. What jumps out immediately? That treatments for HIV and Parkinson’s are both more effective and easily tolerated than others out there for other diseases. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to research in those areas, and it’s paid off. Many believe Parkinson’s has a cure in sight, and HIV has, in less than 30 years, become a manageable chronic condition rather than a death sentence.

But what if you have other conditions? You are clearly making a choice between efficacy of the medications and the side effects that come with them. While aggregated data is great for directional insight, PatientsLikeMe is designed to let you drill down deeper. You can ask each person taking the treatment how it works for him or her. Why? Like everyone, you trust people like yourself who are going through or have gone through the same experiences. Only patients with similar situations can give you specific insight into what tradeoffs need to be considered when potentially trying a new medication. How will it affect my sleep? Is there daytime fatigue or “down time”? Can I operate heavy machinery? Will this treatment impair my ability to work in my profession?

These are the questions many of you are asking. These are the choices you make every day. My mother made her choices and has lived to see the fruits of her sacrifice. If we at PatientsLikeMe are going to help each of you answer the question, “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?”, then we have to continue to show the benefits of openly sharing information with each other. We have to excel at illuminating the real-world efficacy and risks of all kinds of treatments, and we have to help you connect with patients like you in a way that you get personal answers to your questions.

The more data you choose to share, the more we can all make the world of treatment information less imperfect and more personal. Simply stated, we’re all in this together.

One of the ways we can better understand whether you, as patients, are having a positive or negative treatment experience is to “listen” to the conversation you’re having in our forum.  By understanding whether you are having a positive, negative, or neutral experience with a particular treatment you are taking or are considering taking, we can measure the impact of different events on the overall community.

For example, in 2008 we measured the impact on our multiple sclerosis community of a corporate announcement by Biogen about a serious and sometimes fatal side effect of Tysabri (occurs in about 1 in 1000 patients).  The results revealed that patients were indeed frightened by the announcement, but these patients were also so positive about Tysabri’s benefits, that most planned to continue taking the medication regardless of the risk.

Visualizing Perception of Sentiment
We visualize movement in your sentiment via perceptual maps and longitudinal bar charts.  The perceptual map here shows how patient perception (indicated via forum conversations in one disease community) is moving regarding different medications over four periods of time. (Note: each color represents one medication;  the shading represents the change of perception over time with the darkest shade being most recent).  From period to period, it becomes clear which medications you perceive work the best (i.e., Medication D for efficacy) and those that have the most side effects (i.e., Medication A for safety).

A stacked bar chart graph is a way to further break down the sentiment.  For example, the chart below shows the volume of posts about Medication E’s perceived efficacy, whether positive, negative, or neutral by month over time.  This visual allows us to evaluate if certain events impact your perceived efficacy of a particular medication; to create this graph, we look both at volume of posts (spikes) as well as proportion of posts by sentiment (colors).

Why is that important?  Because studies have shown that people who stay on their medications long term get the best health outcomes.  By measuring patient sentiment of discussions, we can predict if patients may discontinue taking their medications and why.  Knowing that, along with the information you share as part of your profiles, helps in research of how outcomes change over time and the impact of peer influence.

These methods are also used in creating our PatientsLikeMeListen^TM service for industry partners.  Their interest is in understanding aggregate perceptions and what influences patient behavior so that they can keep patients like you on medication.  As part of this service, we show them which types of patients are most likely to stay on medication appropriately and which ones might be better off changing medications.

Our goal in analyzing patient sentiment overall and providing the PatientsLikeMeListen^TM service for industry partners is to amplify your voice to anyone listening:  Treat Us Right.

We recently sat down with our executive team here at PatientsLikeMe in our first-ever roundtable-format podcast.  In this PatientsLikeMeOnCall^TM interview, we ask Co-founders Ben and Jamie Heywood, Chief Marketing Officer David S. Williams III, and R&D Director Paul Wicks PhD to discuss why our recent series themes are so important to the history and future of PatientsLikeMe.

Blog Series Themes:

1. “Share and Compare” – where you learned more about how and why patients like you are sharing their health information to put their experiences in context.
2. “One for All” – including visualizations on how one member of a community can be the catalyst for a universe of unparalleled dialogue and support.

While discussing how patients can continue to drive the health care process, they also help us preview this week’s discussion called “Treat Us Right.”

Treat Us Right
In this series, we focus on how you can see if your treatment is right, just by the information shared by patients like you; and how important your shared information is to research efforts – both for academia and industry to learn how they can help each of you make good choices about your treatments.  We’ve heard you tell industry to “Treat Us Right” and we will talk more about it this week.

We kick off “Treat Us Right” week tomorrow with Research Scientist Catherine Brownstein, MPH, PhD describing why it’s critical to compare the PatientsLikeMe communities with the general population of the diseases to begin to assess the validity of treatment outcomes reported on the site.  Stay tuned.

Want to follow our blog?  Check out the sidebar to the right to sign up for a RSS Feed, email reminders or to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.  (And don’t forget to “Share This” any time you see content you like).

As 2009 comes to an end, we want to take this opportunity to thank all of our members, partners and general fans for another great year.   Here’s a recap of some of the exciting happenings at PatientsLikeMe these past 12 months.  Wishing you all a Happy New Year!

Community Milestones
This year, the 15+ disease communities at PatientsLikeMe became an online home to more than 50,000 members.   The fibromyalgia community was expanded this past fall to include patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, and we announced a new community scheduled to launch early next year for people with epilepsy.  In addition to celebrating our communities’ awareness days and months within the site and right here on the blog (including Fibromyalgia Awareness Day, MS and PD Awareness Months, National HIV Testing Day and World AIDS Day), many of our members also participated on PatientsLikeMe teams in walk/run efforts to raise awareness and money in the name of their disease.  Congrats to the 40+ teams walking at events to support non-profit organizations like ALS Association, National MS Society, NAMI, Parkinson’s Alliance, APDA, and the MS Society of Canada. The real-time sharing and learning happening on PatientsLikeMe was also highlighted in the report series called The Patient Voice (starting with inpatient therapy for people with Mood conditions).  Check out highlights from all these programs on these videos from the Fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis and Mood communities.

Many of our members have also become fans of PatientsLikeMe on Facebook.  Here are a few quotes posted to our Facebook page in ’09:

“I find this site so beneficial in looking for the tools to cope with the disease. People post research and real-life patient experiences of current trials and treatments. Hope is a major focus of PLM and I encourage others to join. We are strong in numbers and we have a voice.”

“PLM is a wonderful way to express what and how to live with this disease. It has changed my life for the better, have met wonderful individuals and we have shared, cried and grown by reaching out and expressing from our hearts, have made wonderful friends and have learned so much.”

Research Updates
If you haven’t checked out our research page or subscribed to Google Scholar alerts (92 articles referred to us in 2009!), here’s what you’ve been missing…

This year our ever-growing research team continued their analysis of the real-world data being shared by patients like you.  Awarded the inaugural JMIR award at Medicine 2.0, the PatientsLikeMe research team published pieces on compulsive gambling in patients with Parkinson’s disease in Movement Disorders, expanding the gold standard rating scale in advanced ALS in European Journal of Neurology, and “The power of social networking in medicine” in the highly respected journal Nature Biotechnology.

Throughout the year, the team has also shared insights via videos (like this series on the history of ALS or a recap of a study on the antidepressant Amitriptyline) and various presentations (such as an overview of our work at the at Eurordis AGM in Athens and updates on our lithium study at the International ALS/MND Symposium).  In addition to working on the development of our new communities, the team took additional steps to incorporate genetics into the PatientsLikeMe platform.  By participating in new partner studies (such as 23andMe and NEALS) and utilizing new product upgrades, including the launch of the Genetic Search Engine, patients are learning more about their condition and coming closer to answering the question:  “Given my status, what is the best outcome I can expect to achieve, and how do I get there?”

Keep your eyes out for more to come in 2010 as our R&D team rolls out more insights and outcomes measurements (like the Quality of Life scale in HIV), more improvements to the PatientsLikeMe platform, and cutting edge research in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The Business Side
As Ben said in a recent blog post, “we can’t have a business without you [the patient] and our communities can’t exist to help patients without a business.”  Throughout the year, the PatientsLikeMe executive team traveled around the world to present to industry partners, researchers, healthcare professionals and government leaders about the power of real-world patient data-sharing.  Here are some highlights from ’09:

• Partnerships: Earlier 2009, PatientsLikeMe announced partnerships with biopharma leader UCB to launch an epilepsy community next year and personal genomics company 23andMe to help people with Parkinson’s.

• Government: Piloted in our MS community this year, PatientsLikeMe members now have the ability to voluntarily report adverse events directly to the FDA; in fact, Jamie recently presented about adverse event reporting at an open FDA hearing on the “Promotion of FDA-Regulated Medical Products Using the Internet and Social Media Tools.”  PatientsLikeMe was also one of the collaborating organizations responsible for writing the Declaration of Health Data Rights and launching HealthDataRights.org this past June.  Finally, Jamie testified before the National Committee for Health and Vital Statistics, and gave an exciting rapid-fire presentation on the future of medicine at the Gov 2.0 Summit.

• Innovation: As a leader in Health 2.0, PatientsLikeMe executives are often asked to speak at various industry events.  Check out photos of Ben speaking at The National Summit and stay tuned for videos from Jamie’s presentation at TEDMED and David’s presentation at Bil:Pil.  You can also tune in to our live event tweets on the PatientsLikeMe Twitter account in 2010.

• Media Highlights: PatientLikeMe members, data and executives were also featured in media mentions throughout 2009, including WIRED, Forbes, U.S. News & World Report, Fox Business Live, Newsweek, New York Times, as well as Seed magazine, Nature Biotechnology and Neurology Today.

Happy New Year!
- The PatientsLikeMe Team

A few weeks ago, I gave a 30-minute talk about PatientsLikeMe at Bil:Pil, the unconference following TEDMED in San Diego (where Jamie Heywood made an amazing presentation, by the way). The topic of my presentation was “A Healthy Mix with an Economic Twist.” I focused on how difficult it can be to make money in the Health 2.0 space because companies must balance patient needs with commercial reality to keep the doors open.

Central to that discussion for PatientsLikeMe are our core values. As I’ve discussed many times before, it is our imperative to keep patients first in all of our endeavors, including building the revenue base for the company, because we must honor the trust patients give us in sharing their deep health information.

There was a mini-flurry of Twitter activity during the talk as well. Check out some of the thoughts from leaders in the space to the right.

What do you think? Video from Bil:Pil will be available in the coming weeks. Kudos to Jonathan Sheffi and team for organizing a great unconference!

Last month, PatientsLikeMe announced our partnership with biopharma leader, UCB, to launch a new community for people with epilepsy.  Below is an interview with UCB’s Vice President of Clinical Research, Peter Verdru, MD.  David S. Williams III, head of PatientsLikeMe business development, recently spoke with Peter about the forthcoming epilepsy community, adverse event reporting, and the partnership in general.

***

	(David) UCB is known as The Epilepsy Company.  What’s your goal in partnering with PatientsLikeMe to create a new community for people with epilepsy?
	(Peter) As patient-centric companies, UCB and PatientsLikeMe are both committed to advancing research and improving the lives of people with life-changing conditions.  UCB has a long-term commitment to the epilepsy community – so a partnership with an organization like PatientsLikeMe seemed only natural. Our goal with this partnership is to provide this community to patients with epilepsy to help them manage their disease. Additionally, the community will generate patient-reported outcomes that may help UCB better understand how patients live with epilepsy and help advance epilepsy care. We anticipate patient-reported outcomes data across treatment groups for seizure severity, number of seizures, symptoms, adverse events, health-related quality of life, and co-morbidities, among other things. Using this knowledge for our future clinical research programs would be a logical next step, leading to an even better understanding of what future treatments could offer or what type of patients would gain additional benefit.
	(David) This partnership is said to give patients a voice in advancing research.  How so?
	(Peter) This community will give patients the tools they need to measure their own outcomes. Participants will record their real-time, day-to-day progress in controlling their seizures and achieving their treatment goals, and share that with the community to help other patients, caregivers, researchers and industry learn more about the disease. Tracking their disease over the long-term may help patients and physicians work together to evaluate the impact of their treatment. Eventually, clinical research programs might also benefit from the long-term data these patients are sharing.
	(David) Through the partnership, both companies will be working to design and deploy a system that allows for adverse event reporting to the FDA.  Why?
	(Peter) UCB has an ethical and legal responsibility to report adverse events associated with our drugs. If adverse events for any UCB drugs are mentioned on the site, UCB is required to report these directly to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Therefore, we are working to develop and deploy a solution that will allow us to assess and process potential adverse events, report them to the FDA, and capture them in the UCB safety database.
	(David) What’s the most exciting part of this initiative for UCB?
	(Peter) We’re excited to be taking a leadership role in the pharmaceutical industry to create a community that will give patients a forum for showing their treatment outcomes. Patients are really the experts about how epilepsy impacts their lives. UCB is focused on bringing new treatments to patients with severe diseases like epilepsy. We sincerely believe this unique partnership will bring real value to the large community of patients, families and caregivers
	(David) Thanks Peter!

You’ve spotted us again!  This weekend, PatientsLikeMe was a proud sponsor of the AIDS Walk/Run at Grant Park in Chicago on September 20, 2008.  The event, benefiting the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and 70 other local organizations, brought together more than 7,000 people on this warm, sunny day to show their support in the fight against HIV/AIDS.  Together, participants raised a projected $400,000 for AIDS-related services.

David Williams, Catherine Brownstein and I were at this event, and we were thrilled to meet so many great people, including one of our current members.  As we saw at the AIDS Walk in Boston, there were an overwhelming number of support groups and organizational leaders there dedicated to helping patients.

The PatientsLikeMe HIV community, in particular, was met with great enthusiasm.  Our booth visitors loved that we had social networking components on the site, but were more excited about the patient profiles and treatment reports.  We displayed sample profiles to show how members can chart their treatments, symptoms and outcomes (like CD4 counts and viral loads), and use that information to find others exactly like them.  Many people had heard of websites that offer a place to chat with others, but this health data-sharing approach was new and interesting to all.  Let’s just say heard a lot of  “wows,” which is always exciting and validating for us.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ll notice that we’ve been out and about quite a bit this Fall spreading the word about PatientsLikeMe.  We’ve exhibited and presented at many events, including the Young-Onset Parkinson’s Network Conference, DBSA Annual Conference, MS Challenge Walk and now the AIDS Walk Chicago.  We hope those we’ve met will find their way to our site, and share their stories, their health data, and their passion for advancing the knowledge of these conditions.

We’ll be here – our community arms wide open.