Patients Like Me is a company that encourages patients suffering from diverse illnesses into social networking, and then uses that generated data from social networking to find trends and patterns via data analysis, in order to improve current knowledge about the diseases and the way patients and the general community experience them. By translating personal experiences into data, Patients Like Me allows physicians, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies to improve the quality of the services they offer (PatientsLikeMe, 2011). Patients Like Me takes advantages of established social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other methods like blogging and podcasts to engage with patients and compile data. Social networking via Facebook also allows patients to support each other and learn from each other. Additionally, Patients Like Me compiles data provided by hospitals and other health care centers through their social networks, and computes that information to present it in an understandable and sometimes interactive format. These procedures enhance the opportunity of improvement for health care centers, and aid patients into making better decisions concerning their health.
Patients Like Me is a big data company because it uses data collected from multiple sources (patients, hospitals, etc.) that are not easily analyzed by using only one computer or traditional statistical packages. Big data involves computer science processes such as data mining to try to make sense out of the obtained information. In the case of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, they use loyalty reward programs to customers, slot machines, and customers’ social networking to find patterns and target clients into going to the Caesar’s Palace (Levinson, 2014).
Two product lines that Patients Like Me use are Data For Good, and the opportunity to participate in clinical trials. Data For Good is a patient-oriented program that asks patients to donate their information in order to use it to grow the available body of data for research, and in the long run improve the health care system. Similarly, Patients Like Me helps patients find clinical trials suited to their illnesses and where patients might benefit from treatment options not currently available to the general population, while sharing information to the clinical trial.
References
PatientsLikeMe [PatientsLikeMe]. (2011, April 10). About PatientsLikeMe [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkghBMFJ11o
Levinson, M. (2014, September 7). Book Review: 'What Stays in Vegas' by Adam Tanner.The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 19, 2014, from http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-what-stays-in-vegas-by-adam-tanner-1410123539
