How Crowdsourcing Can Help Improve Healthcare

May 18, 2018 By IdeaConnection

With patients demanding better customer experiences and pharma companies facing increasing pressure to improve outcomes, the need for the healthcare sector to innovate has never been greater.

And that means there is a greater need for smart solutions. An article in the current edition of Forbes online highlights four examples of how this can be achieved through crowdsourcing initiatives.

They are:

1) Crowdsourcing research and discovery: turning to the crowd for help in numerous areas of research with DNA testing companies like 23andMe and Gene by Gene providing pharma companies with opportunities to collaborate with patients to find genetic causes and markers for common diseases such as diabetes and prostate cancer.

2) Raising capital to fund promising new ventures: for example, Ixcela turned to equity crowdfunding to raise funds to develop its proprietary technology to identify imbalances in the gut biome. Its plan is to offer over-the-counter gut health tests.

3) Inspire Entrepreneurial Thinking: an Accenture report on digital disruption discovered that “only 19% of legacy organizations have complete confidence in their operating models’ ability to keep pace.” Accenture pointed out: “in today’s world, speed is more important than scale.” Hence more life sciences companies and health systems are embracing open innovation.

4) Identify The Most Important Unmet Medical Need: some organizations such as the American Heart Association (AHA) consult with patients, caregivers, clinicians and researchers to identify the highest priorities for research.

To read the full article, Four Ways Crowdosurcing Drives Health Care Innovation, click here.


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Reader Comments


We work principally with healthcare products, fostering new inventions and innovations through to market.

The problem is this field is the tremendous costs involved in prototyping and manufacture.

One way we try to keep budgets as low as possible is by borrowing 'lean development' techniques from tech companies. What this means is building absolute minimum viable products to test our ideas and concepts, before advancing to full-on prototyping.

The benefits we've found from taking this approach is that it allows the innovators and startups we work with to fail without fear. Ultimately we're finding this lean approach really cuts time and spend...
Posted by Henry @ Morgan on June 18, 2018

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