Patients Like Me: A Case Study
Patients Like Me is a free data –sharing social network (1). This online community allows patients to communicate and share their health experiences, find others with similar conditions and exchange their medical research and clinical data. Patients Like Me is designed to help its members to quantify data about diseases through detailed questionnaires and survey tools (2). By creating this type of social network, the founders believed that information can change the outcome of the disease and help patients to take control over their health. PLM provides a better way to capture and share valuable information not only among the patients, but also among healthcare organizations and health professionals whose goal is to treat the disease (2).
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Therefore, it greatly enhances members’ understanding of the disease. PLM has more than two hundred thousand members who are sharing their medical information and experiences (5). Moreover, the company’s goal is to empower patients with big data to make informed decisions in order to get the best outcomes. Big Data collects large and complex sets of information that is difficult to process using traditional applications. For this reason, PLM successfully developed some “product lines” to help ordinary patients to navigate through the complexity of information. For instance, one of them is remote monitoring data (6). The site provides analysis of member’s conversations broken down by sex, age, treatments, disease progression. This helps drug makers to create a better research on the most active users. By selling their research services to pharmaceutical companies, to their partners, and to medical device makers PLM is able to keep their website free for its users. Another innovation, PLM network created a developed strategy for measuring mental health. In other words, this strategy is trying to put mental illness into metrics. The site provides sessions of therapy as if they were a dose of prozac; the type of therapy is a treatment, and the length of a session as the dosage
Therefore, it greatly enhances members’ understanding of the disease. PLM has more than two hundred thousand members who are sharing their medical information and experiences (5). Moreover, the company’s goal is to empower patients with big data to make informed decisions in order to get the best outcomes. Big Data collects large and complex sets of information that is difficult to process using traditional applications. For this reason, PLM successfully developed some “product lines” to help ordinary patients to navigate through the complexity of information. For instance, one of them is remote monitoring data (6). The site provides analysis of member’s conversations broken down by sex, age, treatments, disease progression. This helps drug makers to create a better research on the most active users. By selling their research services to pharmaceutical companies, to their partners, and to medical device makers PLM is able to keep their website free for its users. Another innovation, PLM network created a developed strategy for measuring mental health. In other words, this strategy is trying to put mental illness into metrics. The site provides sessions of therapy as if they were a dose of prozac; the type of therapy is a treatment, and the length of a session as the dosage