Crowd Sourcing

The term crowd sourcing was introduced by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in a Wired magazine article in June 2006.(1) “Crowd sourcing” is defined as the act of a company or institution taking a function that once was performed only by employees and outsourcing it to a large network of people. A practice identifies a task or problem that is performed or being discussed in-house and seeks outside help or assistance to do the task or solve the problem. The activity or the problem can be released to the crowd of outsiders who are invited to assist for a specified fee or maybe even at no charge.

Crowd sourcing is powerful and has been in vogue in healthcare for many decades.

Whether you know it or not, you may have already participated in crowd sourcing. For example, if you belong to a listserv (e.g., the American Urologic Association Practice Management listserv, AUA-PMN-QA@lists.auanet.org), you can post a question asking for advice, ask for feedback, or request examples from other practices. Using this same process, you can invite others in your group to share their forms, materials, and questionnaires with other members of the group. Another example of crowd sourcing is the focus group. This consists of an invitation to users of a product, patients in a practice, or potential new patients who might provide ideas regarding what makes for an effective encounter with the practice and the physicians.

Crowd sourcing is powerful and has been in vogue in healthcare for many decades. Even before the Internet became widely available, there was evidence that social networks had a positive influence on patients’ health. In 1979, a large-scale California study showed that people with the lowest levels of social contact had mortality rates two to four-and-a-half times greater than those with strong social networks.(2)

Since then, research has found that a stable and supportive social network improves health outcomes for people with a wide range of conditions, from heart failure to postpartum depression.

Advantages of Crowd Sourcing

The advantage for a practice of outsourcing to a crowd rather than performing operations only in-house is that the practice can gain access to a very large community of potential workers who have a diverse range of skills and expertise and who are willing and able to complete activities within a short period of time and often at a reduced cost.(1) Crowd sourcing provides practices with a large pool of labor outside of the practice, so that necessary tasks can be completed, often in a shorter time and at reduced costs than when the same tasks were done in the office. Crowd sourcing allows menial tasks, which would require time and staff, to be done outside of the office. Crowd sourcing offers access to expertise that often is not readily available within the practice. Finally, crowd sourcing encourages the introduction of new ideas from a large pool of individuals with experiences and different points of view than those that exist within the practice.

Examples of Crowd Sourcing in Medicine

CrowdMed is revolutionizing healthcare by harnessing “the wisdom of crowds” to help solve even the world’s most difficult medical cases quickly and accurately online.

Over 350 million people worldwide, roughly 8% of the population, suffer from 7000 rare and difficult-to-diagnose medical conditions. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a doctor to keep track of thousands of unique medical disorders. CrowdMed attempts to solve the world’s most difficult medical cases not by consulting with individual experts but by contacting large numbers of healthcare providers and researchers. CrowdMed has shown that groups hold far more knowledge collectively than any individual member possibly could. It often takes patients many years, visiting a large number of doctors and accumulating dozens of doctor visits, to find a correct diagnosis. A crowd source approach can process information and find possible answers much faster than consulting with individual physicians.

The facilitation of social networks through the Internet has expanded the possibilities beyond the constraints of in-person, localized contacts.

Instead of relying on individual physicians, CrowdMed taps into the collective wisdom of hundreds of “medical detectives” to produce astonishingly accurate medical diagnostic suggestions, quickly and inexpensively.

The facilitation of social networks through the Internet has expanded the possibilities beyond the constraints of in-person, localized contacts. Users are linked into networks based on shared interests. Links include general sites, such as MySpace, or specific interest-based networks, such as the MySpace CURE DiABETES group.

CarePages.com is a free website dedicated to ensuring that no one has to face a health challenge alone. More than 3.5 million CarePages.com members and visitors use personal, private Web pages to find others, express support, and ask for help from the larger community. The site serves the needs of both patients and their personal caregivers, who often are so focused on others that they do not acknowledge or address their own unmet emotional needs. CarePages.com inspires and guides participants to give each other emotional support in a group setting, bringing them together to share their stories and concerns, their hopes and triumphs.

Another example of using crowd sourcing and social media is to help motivate men and women at risk for AIDs to obtain testing. New research suggests that social media can actually help reduce unsafe sexual behavior among high-risk groups such as patients with HIV.

The study focused on 112 men who have sex with men (MSM) who were recruited through online banner ads on social media sites including Facebook and Craigslist, as well as the web sites of gay community organizations and businesses in Los Angeles.(3) Over half (60%) of the subjects were African-American MSM, and 28% were Latino MSM—both groups at especially high risk for contracting HIV through unprotected sex.

The subjects were then assigned at random to one of two Facebook discussion groups, one focused on general health (as a control group) and the other focused on HIV prevention specifically. Peer leaders helped lead the discussion groups and encouraged subjects to take part, resulting in high engagement rates for both groups; subjects in both groups were also given access to free at-home self-testing kits.

After 12 weeks, the researchers found that crowd sourcing and participation in the online discussion group about HIV increased rates of HIV testing and also produced major behavioral changes, including more frequent use of condoms. Thus 44% of the participants in the experimental group requested a testing kit, compared with 20% in the control group, and were several times more likely to actually complete the test and send it back in order to receive results.

Bottom line: Patients are searching the Internet for information. Some of it is credible, but much of the information that patients have access to is just a sales pitch and very one-sided. Using credible crowd sourcing is an option for the healthcare profession to harness the energy of crowds and help patients find solutions to their healthcare problems. It’s the wave of the future. Doctors need to get on board and ride this wave.

References

1. Howe J. The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired. June 1, 2006; www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html . Accessed November 8, 2013.

2. Langshur S. Online healthcare gets personal. CarePages. 2008; http://cms.carepages.com/export/sites/default/CarePages/en/Press/white_papers/online_health_care_gets_personal.pdf .

3. Young SD, Cumberland WG, Lee SJ, Jaganath D, Szekeres G, Coates T. Social networking technologies as an emerging tool for HIV prevention: a cluster randomized trial. Ann Intern Med. 2013;159:318-324.