23andMe cofounder Linda Avey is taking crowdsourced patient experiences to the web with a soft July launch of a platform called Curious. As reported by Fast Company, the idea is to create a pool of health information that is compiled through self-tracking and then to use that information to reveal trends and commonalities.
Fast Company notes patients with a rare form of muscular dystrophy are being used as a test group. Avey says the benefits include having an invested patient community and being able to help researchers bring together information from patients who don’t share geographies.
As an example, program director Claudia Mitchell told Fast Company that poking around on a Facebook group where patients shared experiences revealed that patients “were always cold no matter what they did—that’s something that no doctor, no scientific article about the disease describes.”
