The Journal of mHealth Vol 2 issue 5 (Oct) | Page 38

How Crowdsourced Insights Can Drive the Future of Digital Health
Continued from page 35

ital health solutions? Can crowdsourcing
opinions, ideas and expertise help us to
create more effective offerings?
The fundamentals that lead to the success
of technology in healthcare are: Effectiveness (will it produce a benefit to the way
services are delivered, improve outcomes,
or increase efficiency?); Adoption (will the
technology be adopted by enough people
to make it viable across organisations and
can those services be delivered at scale, as
well as fit within existing care pathways?);
and Recurrent Engagement (will the
technology continue to produce benefit
over time, and will people or organisations
continue to use and need it?).
Crowdsourcing and Crowd Testing are
effective methods of obtaining collective opinion, insight, ideas, and expertise from participants across the healthcare spectrum to help guarantee that
digital products and services are ‘fit-forpurpose’.
When Harvard Medical School wanted
to optimise the calculation of edit distances between DNA strings they ran
competitive challenges that received over
120 submissions with nearly 90 unique
approaches to solving the problem. More
than half the solutions performed better
than the original solution with the winning
submissions performing 100 times better.
On social networking sites like PatientsLikeMe, individuals with certain health
conditions share and compare their symptoms and responses to different treatments. Experts are also turning to crowdsourcing as a faster alternative to traditional
methods for predicting and monitoring
infectious disease outbreaks. Projects like
HealthMap and NCB-Prepared analyse
data from informal and formal sources
— World Health Organisation alerts, local
health departments, news aggregators,
and social media — to detect outbreaks
and provide real-time surveillance. Following the recent Ebola outbreak in Western Africa informal sources such as news
reports, discussion groups and Twitter
revealed the outbreak’s dynamics well in
advance of official reports.
Similarly, when it comes to Digital Health
development, delivery and adoption having access to Crowdsourcing, Crowd
Testing and Open Innovation tools can
provide a significant advantage.

36

Introducing the Digital Health Crowd
At The Journal of mHealth we believe
strongly in open innovation and allowing
all stakeholders to come together in the
creation of the solutions that are going
to impact the way they work and their
own health conditions, which is why we
have taken the steps to launch the Digital
Health Crowd.
The Digital Health Crowd provides
organisations with the tools necessary
to leverage the passion from individuals
worldwide by enabling participation and
co-creation experiences that are both
rewarding to users and at the same time
enhance innovation, testing, evidence
and market f