With more than 500 attendees from 36 countries, the 5th Annual Medicine 2.0 World Congress took place September 15-16th at Harvard Medical School here in Boston. Among these attendees were several PatientsLikeMe leaders, including keynote speaker Jamie Heywood and conference presenters Sally Okun and Paul Wicks.
In an unusual twist, all three PatientsLikeMe speakers got to present back-to-back, starting with Co-Founder and Chairman Jamie Heywood’s opening keynote about how his brother Stephen’s experience with ALS shaped his understanding of basic concepts like health, well-being and disease. He then shared how PatientsLikeMe was founded to help patients like Stephen record and share their symptom and treatment data in a way that is meaningful to them, other patients and researchers. “Human networks are connecting information and data in ways that have never before existed,” he told the crowd.
Next to speak was Dr. Paul Wicks, our Research & Development Director, who gave a presentation entitled “But Will It Scale? Lessons in Growth from PatientsLikeMe.” He discussed how PatientsLikeMe evolved from a data-sharing platform for patients with a single disease – ALS – to a general platform serving more than 160,000 patients with more than 1,300 health conditions and a myriad of symptoms. Important lessons covered included streamlining the research processes, refining the medical ontology and adjusting the business model.
Finally, PatientsLikeMe Health Data Integrity Manager Sally Okun – whose talk was entitled “Patient Voices: The Power of Shared Knowledge” – then looked at some of the challenges of turning individual stories into shared knowledge. One of the biggest hurdles: how do you capture the patient experience in clinical terms, given that patients don’t speak this way? For example, instead of talking about a “gait disturbance,” patients might report that they are stumbling, limping, dragging a foot or “walking like a drunk.” (In fact, Sally shared that PatientsLikeMe members have used 35 different terms for this one clinical concept.)
What was the reaction to this trio of talks? Sally reports, “I think the juxtaposition of Jamie, Paul and me speaking was quite effective. Our commitment to capturing and honoring the patient voice certainly resonated with the people I spoke with.” Another way to gauge the response – and certainly an apropos one given the conference’s focus on social media – is to examine the Twitter activity generated by these presentations. Here are a few of the 7,000+ (!) Tweets associated with the conference hashtag #med2 that gave shout outs to PatientsLikeMe:
In honor of this month’s Mental Illness Awareness Week, here’s a snapshot of what’s happening in our PatientsLikeMe Mood community. Launched in 2008, the community now has more than 18,000 patients. Below are some interesting facts about the community, so please read and share on!
DID YOU ALSO KNOW…
You can search for patients under 15+ diagnosis categories, including depression, bipolar, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction to tobacco, addiction to alcohol, eating disorder and more.
Patients are using more than 1700 treatments, including prescription drugs, supplements, over-the-counter medications, life-style modifications, therapies, and more.
The top lifestyle modification reported by our patients is positive self talk; and sleep is the #1 exercise cited.
Some of the top topics “tagged” in our forum discussions to date include specific treatments (like Lamictal, Lithium, Wellbutrin and Seroqul), as well as borderline personality disorder, coping, anger and journaling.
Posted by Lori Piscatelli Scanlon | December 31, 2009
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.
“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.”
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:
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.
Posted by Lori Piscatelli Scanlon | November 5, 2009
Earlier this Fall at Medicine 2.0, PatientsLikeMe was honored to receive the inaugural Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) Award for our paper on what we can learn about drugs post market from patients reporting treatment experiences on PatientsLikeMe.
Once a drug is on the market, it can be difficult to evaluate how it’s working in the real world for different kinds of people using it for different purposes. In this paper, our research team examined how we can learn from collecting the experiences from individual members scattered around the world into a single database. The study focused on Amitriptyline, a medication used widely and for a variety of purposes, and reports on why patients take it, the efficacy of the drug, its side-effects and associated burden.
To see patients’ real world experiences with a specific treatment, like Amitriptyline, you can browse the thousands of treatment reports shared on PatientsLikeMe. You can also view a summary of our Medicine 2.0 presentation here or below to learn more about this study. The full paper will be published in 2010, so stay tuned!
Posted by Lori Piscatelli Scanlon | September 12, 2008
Last week, PatientsLikeMe presented a keynote address at the inaugural Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, Canada in front of 200 researchers from 20 countries. A new, annual international conference on Web 2.0 (social web) applications in health and medicine, this year’s event was centered around the theme: “Building Virtual Communities and Social Networking Applications for Patients and Consumers.” You can view the entire conference proceedings online. The event is organized by Gunther Eysenbach, MD MPH, who is the editor and publisher of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, where Jeana Frost and I recently published our paper – “Social Uses of Personal Health Information Within PatientsLikeMe.”
This was a great opportunity to update the research community on how our patient members are engaging in data-driven discussions about their health. In my presentation, I gave an overview of the site, summarized some of our published research results, and provided examples of how patients are using our forum and profile comment tools to better understand their own and other’s experience of symptoms and treatments. What really impressed this audience is that PatientsLikeMe is delivering the best of what “medicine 2.0″ can potentially deliver to the healthcare consumer, and patients are using it. It’s very powerful for others to see how patients are talking with one another about treatment and symptoms experiences (supported by data in their profiles) to achieve better living. This is exactly what can happen when we put “Patients First,” and give them a community to support the right interaction at the right time. Our patient members today feel empowered to take back their health, and this kind of commitment will lead to better research, better healthcare and better quality of life.
At PatientsLikeMe, people with every type of condition are coming together to share their health experiences, find patients like them and learn how to take control of their health. The result is improved care for patients as well as an acceleration of real-world medical research.
Stay tuned to our blog for the latest happenings with our company, our patients and our mission of opening up the healthcare system.
No Comments » 
Conferences/Events, Openness, Research, Technology 
Permalink
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 
AGM in Athens
Innovation: As a leader in Health 2.0, PatientsLikeMe executives are often asked to speak at various industry events. Check out 
