I just read an excellent article about crowdsourcing health care solutions by Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired. The article, titled “Harvard-Based Crowdsource Project Seeks New Diabetes Answers,” describes in great detail a new initiative to crowd source diabetes information with an end goal of curing Type I diabetes. (Almost 2.4 million people in the US suffer from Type I diabetes.) “Using federal stimulus funding from the National Institutes of Health, Harvard Catalyst has teamed up with InnoCentive to explore whether open innovation and crowd-sourcing can spark new directions, collaborations and research in the healthcare community.”
Congratulations to the National Institutes of Health for funding this and to Harvard’s medical research department for developing this crowdsourced medical initiative sure to help those with Type I diabetes.
What’s particularly interesting about the first phase of this project is the goal of ideation. The project’s initial objective is not to identify a specific cure, but to start with the basic premises that there are questions or criteria that may not have been considered before now. (more…)
