Entrepreneur’s drug database brings healthcare big data to the ordinary person
The healthcare industry has created more than 50 petabytes of data, but much of it never reaches the people who could benefit most from it. Former healthcare consultant Johnson Chen wanted to find a way to bring all of the useful, publicly available data from clinical drug trials to consumers who are taking those medications.So he founded eHealthMe, a site that claims to have mined outcomes data on more than 45,000 drugs, vitamins and supplements. It’s put that into a database and created an algorithm that matches users with drug side effects or interactions reported by other people like them.
The company’s personalized symptom checker crunches a user’s information and produces a personalized report based on the data it’s collected from published researching involving people of the same gender, age, medical condition, symptoms and medications. For example, a 57-year-old man who’s taking Lipitor might want to see if his seasonal allergy medicine would interact with it. He would go to the site, enter his information, and eHealthMe would show any of the adverse reactions for people like him held in its database. Meanwhile, it’s also crowdsourcing data from users when they submit inquiries.
A user can also post a specific question about a condition or medication, and the site uses its algorithm to invite other members of the same age, gender or medication routines to answer that question.
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