Crowdsourced Dr House Fills a Niche in Creative Diagnostics
A new gamification startup, CrowdMed (@CrowdMed), has broken into the gamified health field with a unique mobile application that is looking to change how rare diseases are diagnosed.
CrowdMed targets two different audiences. First, the company targets patients who have bounced around from doctor to doctor looking for a diagnosis that fits their symptoms. With CrowdMed, patients fill out a questionnaire to provide details on their symptoms, case history and personal information. Then patients can either submit their case for free or offer a reward to CrowdMed medical detectives for solving their individual case. Sounds almost like turning to Dr House having lost all hope of a diagnosis.
The gamification aspect of CrowdMed occurs on the second side of the equation – its medical detectives. The medical detectives on CrowdMed are reported to “include doctors, residents and regular people that like solving medical mysteries.” Medical detectives are able to both help patients and earn points through CrowdMed. Medical detectives use points when they select a case to review and when they provide diagnosis suggestions. If the medical detectives’ diagnosis suggestion is correct, they are awarded more points.
CrowdMed provides cash rewards to the medical detectives who either provided the potential patient with the best diagnostic idea or placed their point bets on the correct diagnoses. CrowdMed earns their money through a 10% commission on all cash rewards.
So far, CrowdMed have self-reported their success as having ran “over 100 real-world cases through our system and less than 10% of patients have reported our Medical Detectives diagnostic suggestions to be inaccurate. In all other cases, we’ve produced helpful diagnostic suggestions or — at worst — confirmed the patient’s preexisting diagnostic hypotheses.”
CrowdMed is a unique startup that provides patients who struggle to find a diagnosis with the aid of medical experts who want to earn a little extra money and enjoy helping others. It allows patients access to multiple medical experts that would take them countless doctors visits and thousands of dollars to access in the real world. CrowdMed’s gamification startup fills a unique need within the medical community, much like Wikistrat fills the gap with cross-discipline consulting.
Would you consider using CrowdMed to help diagnose your medical condition? Do you think this is an appropriate use of gamification? Please share your thoughts below.
As a gamification consultant I don’t have any doubt about the value it could add but this is going too far! The medical diagnosis should be left to the doctors/ experts. There is no point in sourcing ‘assumptions’ when people know so less about the medical problem. This use case gets a thumbs down from me!