New partnership will speed medical diagnoses through crowdsourcing
pharmafile | October 5, 2015 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Global Genes, Sermo
The global social network for physicians, SERMO, is partnering with Global Genes, a leading rare disease patient advocacy organisation, to provide patients with unprecedented access to hundreds of thousands of physicians from around the world who may be able to accelerate their diagnoses and treatments through medical crowdsourcing.
Medical crowdsourcing on the SERMO social network allows doctors to benefit from the wisdom of their peers by creating a mechanism for them to ask for help and receive responses instantaneously from practitioners around the world at no cost.
According to Global Genes, it currently takes an average of over seven years to accurately diagnose a rare disease and most patients are misdiagnosed multiple times in the process. SERMOs’ creators believe medical crowdsourcing can help drastically reduce these challenges and accelerate proper diagnosis.
“Rare diseases are just that: rare,” says Teri Willochell, an internal medicine specialist and Sermo member. “Physicians don’t see them frequently and very few doctors have experience with them. The partnership between SERMO and Global Genes will create an extraordinary tool for doctors – connecting physicians with experience with these diseases with doctors who may not have that knowledge to medically crowdsource and solve these tough cases faster.”
As part of the partnership, SERMO is launching a new program called SERMOheroes, which will allow patients and their families who are working with Global Genes to have their cases submitted to SERMO for advice on diagnostics and treatments for free.
Since SERMO is a physician-only community, patients’ whose physicians are not members of the social network will be paired with what the company turns a ‘SERMOhero’: a physician who has agreed to liaise with the social network of nearly 400,000 doctors on their case and relay their advice.
SERMO is creating a Rare Disease Hub on the network to house SERMOheroes patient cases. The Hub will also feature educational resources from Global Genes so physicians can learn about rare diseases, original articles from physicians about their experiences with rare diseases and new research about them, a video library and poll questions that capture physicians’ opinions.
Peter Kirk, CEO of SERMO, comments: “Medical crowdsourcing is revolutionising medicine and is especially important when it comes to rare diseases that your average doctor does not see in day-to-day practice. We are proud to be connecting patients with rare diseases and their families with physicians for the first time so they can quickly benefit from the experiences and medical wisdom of doctors from around the world.
“By providing this service for free, SERMOheroes will also reduce some of the medical costs associated with diagnosing and treating a patient with a rare disease.”
A recent Global Genes survey of patients, family members, physicians and allied health care professionals (HCPs) published in The Journal of Rare Disorders (JRD) identified a significant level of physician interest in helping patients with rare diseases and a compelling need for additional physician education and referral programs in rare diseases.
Joel Levy
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