@rrhoover Just saw this. I like the idea. It's really bold, and while I think people would be nervous trusting such a service, I think statistics bear out the concept. For example, the "guess how many jelly beans are in this jar" game is difficult for any one person to guess. And the winner at one game will commonly be way off on the next. However, the bell curve of the ENTIRE CROWD's guesses is usually centered very close to the answer.
On the other side, doctors miss diagnoses all the time, or could take months of "a couple tests at a time" to get there themselves. US doctors in particular are often guilty of protracted diagnosis/testing periods (try this and come back in 2 months. No? Ok try this...) Doctors abroad more often have a more solution-focused approach (here's the decision tree, we need these 7 tests to know for sure what you've got by next week). For people with cases like you see in House, I could see the Wisdom of Crowds working well. Or for any of the 48 million uninsured americans currently avoiding the doctor.
At Emissary, the number one thing we're solving for is trust. We're extremely zealous with vetting the doctors on the supply side of our marketplace. A nice feather in CrowdMed's cap is that I assume they're just supplying *suggestions* for the patients existing doctor to consider. Should reduce friction in consumer adoption.
Curious how they plan to monetize. I don't know how many rare disease cases there are, but by definition, there can't be many, right? :)
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As CrowdMed’s founder & CEO, I’m happy to join the discussion!
I know that our medical crowdsourcing concept sounds a bit bold at first blush, but our statistics show that it’s working extremely well:
— we’ve had nearly 700 real-world medical mysteries resolved on the site so far
— our average patient had been sick for 8 years, seen 8 doctors, and incurred more than $60,000 in medical expenses before submitting their case on our site
— despite the difficulty of these cases, we have a >60% success rate bringing these patients closer to a correct diagnosis or cure
— our average cost to resolve these cases is around $200 and average case resolution time is about 60 days
Best of all, we’re saving or dramatically improving dozens of lives every week.
In regards to monetization, right now we’re charging patients directly to submit their case on our site, with packages starting at just $99. Although we estimate that only 2-3% of the population falls within our target market, these patients represent about 12-15% of total healthcare costs, which is over $360 billion in the US alone. We believe that healthcare payers (insurance companies, employers, the government) have a strong financial incentive to have their toughest cases solved on our site vs. the traditional medical system, and plan to start talking with them in the near future.
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