The Value of Openness: The PatientsLikeMe Blog

In one of the greatest honors in our young company to date, PatientsLikeMe was featured in today’s New York Times Magazine. The article, entitled Practicing Patients, appropriately discusses the pros and cons associated with sharing data-rich personal health information in an open community.

PatientsLikeMe seeks to go a mile deeper than health-information sites like WebMD or online support groups like Daily Strength. The members of PatientsLikeMe don’t just share their experiences anecdotally; they quantify them, breaking down their symptoms and treatments into hard data. They note what hurts, where and for how long. They list their drugs and dosages and score how well they alleviate their symptoms. All this gets compiled over time, aggregated and crunched into tidy bar graphs and progress curves by the software behind the site. And it’s all open for comparison and analysis. By telling so much, the members of PatientsLikeMe are creating a rich database of disease treatment and patient experience.

With amazing patient successes balanced by medical leaders’ skepticism, author Thomas Goetz strikes a critical chord within the current healthcare debate. Is the American health system broken? Can patients fix it through aggregation of collective experience? Are patients to be trusted to report their own health conditions? What does PatientsLikeMe mean for the medical establishment?

PatientsLikeMe is a tool that allows patients to manage their disease with a sophistication and precision that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The 7,000 members of PatientsLikeMe, in other words, are beta testers — they may be the vanguard of how we all will care and treat our résumé of chronic diseases.

The article cites the PatientsLikeMe Openness Philosophy; the manifesto that draws our company line in the sand. Openness can lead to better outcomes and accelerate research like never before. This is our goal for PatientsLikeMe. This isn’t health science fiction. It’s happening today with the help of thousands of patients.

So read the article–and join PatientsLikeMe–to see where you stand.

Over the past seven months of working at PatientsLikeMe, I’ve come to think that the idea of sharing medical and health information is completely normal. Since giving birth to my nearly 3 year old daughter, I have continued to be eternally grateful to other mothers who have willingly and openly shared their deeply personal experiences and advice so readily. There are some unexpected things you have to deal with, and nothing is so helpful as the wisdom of others who’ve been there. Then this December, I had a moment of pause. All of us at the company received a year-end gift of 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service. Here was my chance to find out what my genes have in store for me and to find out what I might have passed onto my little girl. But do I really want to know? And once I find out, do I want share that information?

Well, it took a while to decide and I hadn’t expected that. I realized that deciding to put very personal details about my health, current or future, out into the world is no small thing. I commend each and every person who has chosen to share their information in our PatientsLikeMe communities. I wouldn’t have made it this far into motherhood without the nitty-gritty, honest information that other mothers have shared with me, and I’ve been truly and deeply inspired by the information that people have so willing shared on our site. I would certainly want access to that knowledge and experience if I needed it. But, if I want to have access to that kind of information, then I have to do my part too. So in the end, I decided to spit. Now I’m waiting to find out what my genes have in store for me and my family. Openness, here I come.

Bringing the New Year in right, Benjamin Heywood, CEO of PatientsLikeMe, was interviewed by David E. Williams, publisher of the Health Business Blog (not to be confused with David S. Williams who works with PatientsLikeMe). In the interview, Ben discusses the future of the company, its ground-breaking Openness Philosophy, and the differentiation of PatientsLikeMe versus other Health 2.0 companies.

Here’s how David E. Williams characterized PatientsLikeMe:

PatientsLikeMe is one of my favorite Health 2.0, social networking websites. The online community enables patients with serious illnesses to build content-rich connections to similar patients. Patients are motivated to provide all the relevant information about themselves and to stick with the site over time to help one another. As a consequence, PatientsLikeMe users collectively generate robust data sets that have the potential to generate meaningful insights for researchers and commercial entities. That leads to some interesting business opportunities for the company.

The interview provides great insight about PatientsLikeMe. Enjoy!

Welcome to the PatientsLikeMe blog. Here you will get firsthand accounts of our growth and how we are impacting global health care. Why have we chose the name “The Value of Openness”? Read our Openness Philosophy below, and you’ll see why.

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Openness is a good thing.

Most healthcare websites have a Privacy Policy. Naturally, we do too. But at PatientsLikeMe, we’re more excited about our Openness Philosophy. It may sound counterintuitive, but it’s what drives our groundbreaking concept.

You see, we believe sharing your healthcare experiences and outcomes is good. Why? Because when patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible. New treatments become possible. Most importantly, change becomes possible. At PatientsLikeMe, we are passionate about bringing people together for a greater purpose: speeding up the pace of research and fixing a broken healthcare system.

Currently, most healthcare data is inaccessible due to privacy regulations or proprietary tactics. As a result, research is slowed, and the development of breakthrough treatments takes decades. Patients also can’t get the information they need to make important treatment decisions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. When you and thousands like you share your data, you open up the healthcare system. You learn what’s working for others. You improve your dialogue with your doctors. Best of all, you help bring better treatments to market in record time.

PatientsLikeMe enables you to effect a sea change in the healthcare system. We believe that the Internet can democratize patient data and accelerate research like never before. Furthermore, we believe data belongs to you the patient to share with other patients, caregivers, physicians, researchers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and anyone else that can help make patients’ lives better.

Will you add to our collective knowledge… and help change the course of healthcare?

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Thoughts? Comments? We’re always eager to engage in conversation regarding openness of health data.

Thanks, and welcome to “The Value of Openness”.