VITALCROWD

VitalCrowd is a crowdsourcing the design and direction of health research, catalyzing collaboration among patients. Vital Crowd is an experiment, driven by passion, informed by experience and catalyzed by frustration with the ‘way things work’ in health care research and design. While more and more people are realizing that they need those who live within the confines of the health care system to participate in the design of health research, finding a way to do that has been challenging. R... esearchers are relying on one-off focus groups or ad hoc conversations with patients or caregivers, followed by limited opportunities to collaborate in defining the actual protocol or providing insights on methods. What’s lacking is a way to enable meaningful, ongoing collaboration between the health care community and the researchers who seek to understand it. VitalCrowd was created to make that collaboration possible – and scalable. Drawing on new models for crowdsourcing and Web-based collaboration, they hope to bring the full health care community – patients, caregivers, community physicians, researchers, funders and developers alike – into a collaborative, efficient tool that takes health care research where they know it needs to go.More