#crowdmed

As with many other crowd based services, users will be rated and given points through their use of the site. These points act as a sort of virtual currency that can be bet on the correct diagnosis from a list of suggestions. These bets form the basis of a prediction market, with the suggested diagnosis rising and falling in price, just like stocks on the stock exchange. The site then uses algorithms to calculate the probability that each diagnosis is correct.

Once the crowd have arrived at their consensus, the CrowdMed site shows patients the top three suggestions, which they are then free to explore with their doctor. If the diagnosis proves correct, the doctor is encouraged to feed the results back into the site, with the participants rewarded accordingly. The results thus far look somewhat promising. As the number of users increase using the site, the owners expect accuracy to increase.

In Crowd We Trust?

The obvious question: Can a crowd of strangers with unknown amounts of medical expertise be trusted to safely and correctly diagnose baffling medical problems? CrowdMed claims that after "four years of development" it possess a patented "unique technology" specifically designed to optimize group intelligence for medical diagnostic purposes.

From its site:

Groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member, no matter how brilliant. With hundreds of minds working in parallel, groups can process information much faster than individuals.

What Do Real MDs Think?

The first rule of medicine is "primum non nocere", Latin for "first, do no harm." It does not necessarily apply to the crowd. Not surprisingly, the CrowdMed approach bothers many real physicians.

I'm on the fence about it. I want to be enthusiastic, but I have concerns about it. One of my primary concerns is the numerous false positives that CrowdMed's "MDs" which stands for "Medical Detectives" might generate. I have seen many patients misled by the Web, and we as Physicians often have to un-educate them.