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An excellent article in Businessweek highlights the fact that Social networks like PatientsLikeMe let people take charge of their own care—changing the nature of drug research and the practice of medicine
Related articles
- Deals of the Week Ponders PatientsLikeMe and Empowerment (invivoblog.blogspot.com)
- Merck to draw on social network for psoriasis patients (fiercebiotechit.com)
- Merck’s partnership with online patient community could offer innovative way forward for drug development (medcitynews.com)
- Online community PatientsLikeMe gets $2 million in new equity investments (medcitynews.com)
- Patient-led “clinical trials” versus clinical research (2012 edition) [Respectful Insolence] (scienceblogs.com)
- Social network alchemy (thetechblock.com)
- The perils of “patient-driven” clinical research (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
- Better medicine, brought to you by big data [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)
- Healthy Labs launches its social network for people with chronic conditions (venturebeat.com)
- Healthy Labs creates social networks for diseases (vator.tv)
lets users share specific healthcare experiences for others’ benefits. The site also features member endorsements to give more weight to beneficial posts. The service centers around the theme of “The Power of Been There” and does not attempt to compete with services like the recently launched Google Health, which focus on personal health records rather than shared medical experiences.
It would appear, though, that this is a legitimate social network, one that while is a business model that benefits the pharmaceutical companies with opinion research data, is more about connecting doctors with one another and fostering legitimate medical research into treatment methods with new and existing medications.