When Jared Heyman’s younger sister Carly became mysteriously sick while away at college, it took years of research, dozens of doctors and more than $100,000 just to diagnose her condition. The mystery was solved, not by one specialist, but by the joint efforts of multiple medical experts, whose combined knowledge helped crack the case.
In part inspired by this experience, Heyman launched a health care startup that aims to provide medical diagnoses through crowdsourcing in 2012. Since then CrowdMed has served 3,000 cases and raised $5 million in seed funding.
“We specialize in solving medical mysteries,” said CrowdMed CEO Danyell Jones, who is based in Tampa and was most recently named among Tampa Bay Inno’s Inaugural Inno on Fire winners.
Patients submit their case details through the CrowdMed website, which then distributes the case to its “medical detectives,” who range from licensed physicians to nurse practitioners to physician’s assistants. These medical sleuths then review the patient’s case, ask questions and offer recommendations for how to proceed.
Some 20,000 people are registered as medical detectives through CrowdMed. Roughly 10,000 have been active in the past six months and a fraction of those make up the company’s core base. Each medical detective is given a ranking based on their credentials, which helps a backend algorithm determine how much weight to give to each submitted diagnosis. Thus, a diagnosis from a board-certified specialist has more influence than one from a physician’s assistants.
CrowdMed’s algorithm functions “almost like a futures market,” Jones said, by floating to the top the three most prominent diagnoses. Patients are then encouraged to seek local medical advice.
“If there was something bothering you from a medical perspective, you could see one doctor, but he might not know what it is,” Jones said. “If you see an entire panel of specialists that get to weigh in, you’re more likely to get the appropriate and correct answer.”
Crowdsourcing medical diagnoses isn’t CrowdMed’s innovative idea. It was popularized in 2010 by Dr. Lisa Sanders, whose column, Diagnosis, explores medical mysteries for The New York Times. Her column, which this year was made into a Netflix show of the same name, was also the inspiration for the show House M.D.
CrowdMed employs two revenues streams: an ad-supported business to consumer service and an enterprise model for health insurers. For the B2C model, patients submit a case and pay a fee corresponding to the level of attention their case will get. Those levels include standard ($149/month), premium ($299/month) and elite ($749/month). Whereas standard cases are open to review by all medical detectives, elite cases are open to just the top tier registrants.
CrowdMed currently employs two full-time employees, along with a handful of 1099 contracts.
“We are a tight but mighty team,” said Jones.
Jones said CrowdMed’s patients have on average spent tens of thousands of dollars in the traditional health care system, without finding relief or proper diagnoses. According to CrowdMed’s own research, the company has an 80% success rate with finding the correct diagnosis within two to three months. CrowdMed has helped correctly diagnose many ailments, including metabolic, autoimmune and neurological conditions.
