What’s it like to work at PatientsLikeMe?  We are continuing to reveal just that with our monthly blog series “A Day in the Life,” which features employees from different departments.  So far, we’ve interviewed User Experience Engineer Cris Necochea, Research Assistant Shivani Bhargava, Office Manager Alison Dutton,  Research Scientist Timothy Vaughan and Biz Dev’er Arianne Graham.  Today we’d like to introduce you to Product Manager Maureen Oakes, or as she’s affectionately known around the office, “Mo.”

1.  You’re the Product Manager at PatientsLikeMe.  Tell us what that involves.

A little bit of everything! I read in an article that product managers are like “embedded CEOs” because you drive the core decisions to improve and change the product, which in this case is the PatientsLikeMe website. That means different things depending on the circumstances. Sometimes my job is getting all the right people in the room to make a decision, and sometimes it is making a decision myself. In all cases, it involves listening, asking good questions, weighing all the options and following up to make sure what needs to get done actually happens.

Each day I split my time between planning ahead for enhancements we could make to the site in the coming weeks and months and ensuring the things the engineering team is building now are going smoothly.  For example, when we are trying to decide what to work on, we have to ask, “Is A more important than B? What is affected if we choose to work on C instead? Who benefits most from each of those options and how much work is it to accomplish?” It’s my job to tee up those questions so that we are working on the right things at the right time.

The same goes for things we are building now – there are tradeoffs and decisions to be made all day long.

2.  As a longtime employee, what milestones stick out to you?

There are so many! But I think the first would be the launch of the mood conditions community in 2008. I joined PatientsLikeMe in 2007 so it was the first time I participated in building out a community – hearing the research team’s thoughts on disease measures, showing examples to get feedback from patients, and being there to welcome the first members. There was a New York Times Magazine article about PatientsLikeMe around the time we launched, so several thousand people joined that first week. It was amazing to see the community take off so quickly.

In 2010, we started work on another milestone – a project to open up PatientsLikeMe to anyone with any condition. That was a ton of work, but it was great to have the whole company focusing on a very clear goal and working closely together to achieve it. I was especially motivated because my mother was undergoing treatment for lymphoma at the time, and every day I wished we had had PatientsLikeMe members and tools available for her condition. In 2011, she went into remission and PatientsLikeMe opened its doors to anyone with any condition, so that was huge, both personally and professionally.

3.  You’re also the resident baker at PatientsLikeMe.  What treats do you make?

I’m a big fan of celebrating birthdays so my standing offer is to bake whatever a PatientsLikeMe employee requests for his or her birthday each year.

I’ve made all kinds of things – Oreo and whipped cream desserts, carrot cupcakes, brownies, apple cake, triple chocolate cake. But the biggest challenge has definitely been Boston Cream Pie. It is not easy to make, but it’s a huge hit, so now lots of people keep requesting it.

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Want to make a difference in patients’ lives?  Maureen is currently searching for a Senior User Experience (UX) Designer to join her team.  “This may be my biggest project right now!” she says.  “We already have one great designer, but we need help to keep improving the site at a faster pace.”  Learn more about the benefits of working at PatientsLikeMe on our Careers page.

Thanks everyone for a great 2010.  As we kick off the New Year, PatientsLikeMe would like to take a quick look back at the road we’ve traveled together this year.  We think of all these improvements as laying the groundwork for even more exciting changes to come in 2011.

At the start of 2010, we set out to tackle two very important goals that could help you, our members, get the best possible experience out of PatientsLikeMe:  1) unify the way we collect medical information and 2) give more information back to you so you can see how you fit in and compare your experiences with others.  Kate Brigham recently talked about some of the improvements we’ve made on the second goal in her Share and Compare post, but I’d like to share a bit more about the first goal.

Our communities have a lot in common despite their different conditions and health concerns.  As Tommy Maker said in a recent newsletter interview, “I’ve learned that we all care enormously for each other and are very eager to help those who find themselves in the same boat as we are.  But most of all I’ve learned that I am not on my own.”

“We are all in this together” is the sentiment we hear from you time and time again.  In that spirit, we made a lot of changes to unify your experiences across all our communities.  Many of these improvements started in one community where some of you tried functionality and gave us good feedback so we could improve things and share them with all patients.  With the rollout of every product development below, you can now better share and compare your experiences.

Here are some examples of ways our communities have helped each other learn and grow in 2010:

• Flash charts: We piloted these in the ALS community last January and received a lot of great feedback.  Since that successful pilot, we converted the profile charts in all our communities to these more flexible and easier to understand charts.  This change also enabled future enhancements, like re-organizing your profile and better Doctor Visit Sheets.

• Condition History: While many of the questions you answer on PatientsLikeMe are very specific to your medical condition, there are a lot of questions that apply to any and all patients.  When did your symptoms start?  Do you have a diagnosis?  Are you taking any treatments?  Now members across communities answer many of the same questions in the condition history so everyone can share and see how their answers compare with the rest of the community.

• InstantMe: This idea of asking you a quick question about how you are doing started out as InstantMood, and was available only to members of the mood community.  They gave us great feedback and helped us to improve it (especially adding a “neutral” answer choice) before we rolled it out to patients in all our communities in November.  It’s now called InstantMe.

• Quality Of Life: The quality of life survey we just made available to all members at the end of December was piloted in the HIV and Organ Transplants communities.  By having a way to measure your social, mental and physical well-being, now you can gain a better understanding of how your condition affects you – the whole you.

Thank you to all the members of our community who continue to share and learn along with us.  Watch this year in review video to see how you all have contributed to making the patient experience on PatientsLikeMe one of a kind.

The PatientsLikeMe team has been traveling around the globe recently talking about the power of real-world patient data in changing healthcare.  You may have heard about our executives at industry conferences, government hearings, or even on TV.  Highlights below.

Last month, PatientsLikeMe Co-founder and President Ben Heywood was on Fox Business News talking about how industry is engaging directly with patients and tuning into the “unvarnished truth” patients are sharing about their real-world disease experiences.

Earlier in March, we launched our PatientsLikeMeOnCall^TM podcast series to bring to you our leaders’ perspectives on topics that impact you, the patient, and the healthcare industry as a whole.  We kicked off the series with Ben’s interview regarding Fast Company recognition.  You can check out that one and the rest of our podcasts on iTunes or click on the links below to start listening to a specific interview.  As podcast host Aaron Fleishman says, “thanks for stopping by and listening and we’ll talk to you next time.”

• Listen | Ben Heywood (Co-founder, President) answers questions about the launch of our new organ transplants community and our collaboration with Novartis
• Listen | David S. Williams III (Chief Marketing Officer) shares industry best practices in using social media for clinical trial recruitment (recently presented at the CHI SCOPE conference)
• Listen | Paul Wicks Ph.D. (R&D Director) discusses nexus of personalized medicine and information technology (highlights from his presentation given at a Personalized Conference event by ASU, Mayo Clinic, AAAS, FDLI)
• Listen | Jamie Heywood (Co-founder, Chairman) visits “on call” to talk about the impact of real-world experience on drug safety
• Listen | Sally Okun RN (Health Data Integrity Manager) gives her perspective on improving patient engagement and fostering patient-provider partnerships through tools like the Doctor Visit Sheet (highlights from her presentation at the Patient E-Centered Health event by The Stevens Institute of Technology)
• Watch | Maureen Oakes (Product Manager) shows you cool new website functionalities making their debut with the new transplants community
• Watch | Paul Wicks Ph.D. (R&D Director) talks about the value of patients measuring quality of life through online patient-reported outcome

One thing that’s great about working at PatientsLikeMe is that our members are really invested in making our product better. Every day, we receive lots of great recommendations about how to improve the site.   Today, we’re unveiling newly redesigned treatment reports that incorporate feedback we’ve received in all our communities.  Want to know what medications patients like you are using to treat their condition and compare your experiences with others?  That’s what you can do with a treatment report.   In redesigning these reports, we wanted to make them more useful, more visible and easier to navigate.  Now you can:

• Understand the experience of taking a treatment, including what the side-effects are and how people manage those side-effects
• Learn how to cope with taking a drug (with tips and advice from other members and links to relevant forum threads)
• Find and contact other patients like you who use a certain treatment (such as people who report the same side effects or people who take it for the same reason)
• See how your experiences compare to those of other patients like you

If you’d like a tour of these new reports, check out the screencast below by our web developer Adam Darowski.  We’ll continue to update you through the forum, our newsletters and the blog on what’s new and improved on the site.  Your feedback helps us to continue to fulfill our promise of delivering a website that helps you and makes you say “wow.”  Please, keep it coming…

Over the weekend, PatientsLikeMe was an exhibitor at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance’s 2008 National Conference, which took place September 11-14th in Norfolk, Virginia.  The theme was “The Power of Peers.”

While I spent most of my time at our sponsor table answering questions about PatientsLikeMe, I overheard other attendees discussing a concept I found very interesting. A talk called “I Am Not My Illness: The Importance of First Person Language” by Stephen Propst prompted a lot of discussion from attendees about the distinction and power of saying “I am bipolar” versus “I have bipolar.” He noted that people with other conditions do not say “I am cancer” or “I am diabetes” and that the language we use has the power to change how we think about the intersection of our health and our identity.

As I listened to people hashing out the details and implications of being more thoughtful with our language, I thought more about how it relates to the collective power of peers.  Face to face conversations are a time-tested method for empowering others and making change, but having conversations online can magnify your message far beyond a two person discussion. Having read over 2000 threads in our Mood community in the last 7 months, I know that our members empower one another on a daily basis.  While a single forum thread may have 20 replies, it can be viewed by hundreds of people, escalating the impact of the conversation far beyond its participants. Add to that the ability to see each person’s status from their shared health data profiles, and everyone has the opportunity to learn in multiple ways on PatientsLikeMe.

This single lecture sparked great conversations among the few hundred folks who attended the event, and now the conversation is continuing with our members. Empowering patients through conversations and shared data is producing real change: that’s the power of peers.

Are you on Facebook? We are! Simply search for “PatientsLikeMe” to find our new company page. Once there, click “Become A Fan,” and a “My Pages” link will be added to your profile. Remember, Facebook is an open platform that anyone can view and isn’t part of PatientsLikeMe. Therefore, any information you share about you is open to the 100 million Facebook members. Thanks for spreading the word about us to your Facebook friends.

Currently, our Facebook page features photos from the AIDS Walk Boston, which drew over 20,000 participants and raised $1.2 million. We were proud to be a sponsor of the Wellness Festival that accompanied the successful June 1st event. Where can you see us next? We’re a sponsor of the National Parkinson’s Foundation’s 6th Annual Young-Onset Parkinson’s Network Conference, August 7th-9th in Atlanta, Georgia. Staffers Paul Wicks, a speaker at the conference, and Maureen Oakes will be present.