Tag: Openness

The Smart List (Forget Medical Privacy) and The Future of Healthcare

Check out the October issue of WIRED magazine!  PatientsLikeMe makes “The Smart List:  12 Shocking Ideas That Will Change the World.”  In an interview with Brendan Koerner (“Forget Medical Privacy“), Co-founder Jamie Heywood talks about how “the lack of openness [in medicine] is making us sicker” and how sharing individual health data can benefit you. … Continue reading The Smart List (Forget Medical Privacy) and The Future of Healthcare

Charting the course of PLS and PMA

Primary Lateral Sclerosis (PLS) and Progressive Muscular Atrophy (PMA) are two rare variants of the disease ALS. Normally, ALS affects the upper motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, as well as the lower motor neurons that send signals from the spinal cord directly to muscles. PLS and PMA are different because PLS only… Continue reading Charting the course of PLS and PMA

Patients like me declare our health data rights

“We the people…have the right to our own health data.” That’s part of a collective new Declaration of Health Rights, officially unveiled tonight on the newly launched HealthDataRights.org. It is time to turn the conversation from fear and privacy to sharing data and finding new treatments and better care. The Declaration represents reality that what… Continue reading Patients like me declare our health data rights

Sharing Is A Right As Well

We do not live our lives alone. We live our lives in collaboration with others. We communicate our needs and our goals, and together we work to achieve them. This is exceptionally true for families and individuals dealing with illness. Whether you’re dealing with depression, or pain, or perhaps the fear and stigma of HIV,… Continue reading Sharing Is A Right As Well

Introducing “The Patient Voice” – First up? Inpatient Therapy

Today’s patient has a loud and strong voice.  At PatientsLikeMe, we hear you.  You’re saying, “I know this disease, I know how it acts in the real-world, and it’s time to share that with others.” With thousands of patients sharing data and experiences every day on our site, we’ve decided to launch a report that… Continue reading Introducing “The Patient Voice” – First up? Inpatient Therapy

Sharing to Feel Better

Sharing.  It’s a concept we all learn at a very young age.  Oftentimes reminisced as happening in the sandbox, we think back to our young selves giving up what we hold most dear (in this case, some cheap plastic toy) to allow someone else to benefit from it.  It seems so simple and obvious, but… Continue reading Sharing to Feel Better

We Share Too! Contributing Open Source Code

“Open source software” is created and improved collaboratively, over the web, by the people who need it, even if they work for different companies in different industries on different continents. Similar to our Openness Philosophy, the premise behind open source software is that none of us is as smart as all of us. Software developers… Continue reading We Share Too! Contributing Open Source Code

Voices of Fibromyalgia: Patient Video

As we end the year, we give you the last 2008 video from PatientsLikeMe and the first of our new fibromyalgia community.  We asked this newly launched community to tell us “How are you overcoming fibromyalgia?”  This is what they had to say: Thanks to all of you who contributed your “voice” to this video.… Continue reading Voices of Fibromyalgia: Patient Video

Structuring and Presenting the Patients’ Perspective at AMIA

PatientsLikeMe members share health data on the site adding their own individual-level health experience to a repository of structured outcome data. The result? An unprecedented data set that informs medical conversation not only within the patient community but also with the larger scientific one. Earlier this fall, the venue for this conversation was the annual… Continue reading Structuring and Presenting the Patients’ Perspective at AMIA