In the age of social media, blogs, and online forums, the most common practice when feeling slightly under the weather has undeniably become to resort to a quick Google search. Unfortunately, when they are not unnecessarily worrying, the answers found on the web are typically inconclusive.
That observation is what prompted Israeli entrepreneur Yael Elish to launch StuffThatWorks, an AI-based online platform that collects crowdsourced data about a host of chronic conditions. The idea being that, unlike Facebook groups or Reddit threads, the information shared by patients is centralized and assessed for quality to readily provide informed data to other users who are enquiring about their own symptoms.
Elish is a former member of the founding team for crowdsourced navigation app Waze, but this time instead of tapping user-generated content to come up with traffic predictions and accident warnings, StuffThatWorks is intended to give users better insights into illness.
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A few years ago, Elish's ten-year-old daughter started developing a chronic condition. Although not life-threatening, the disease was severe enough to be seriously disruptive; but even after several visits to different specialists, Elish determined that formal medical advice wouldn't help soon enough.
The entrepreneur spent months frantically questioning her Google search bar. After a couple of years, she eventually stumbled upon an alternative treatment that was administered to her daughter – and this time, it actually worked.
"I started realizing that many people faced the same situation," Elish tells ZDNet. "And the problem is that regardless of the condition, whether the disease has been heavily researched or not, there is no organized database where the effectiveness of different treatments is actually being compared."
The pharmaceutical industry has a well-documented drug effectiveness problem. Typically, the drug development