How social data could help expose drug side effects, personalize prescriptions
Summary
“It’s not one size fits all.” Part of TechStars Boston’s fall class, MyBetterFit aggregates comments from health forums and then parses out relevant information about treatments and side effects to create patient profiles against which users can compare their experiences. Winn and her team are still building out the site, but the goal is for women to be able to answer a few questions about their current experiences with birth control, and ultimately their medical history, and then receive social-data-driven recommendations. A Las Vegas biotech startup, called Lucine Biotechnology, which my colleague Derrick Harris has written about, is somewhat similarly attempting to improve women’s healthcare by drawing connections between social comments online and information gathered through salivary hormone monitoring. And Alliance Health Networks, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based company recently covered by our colleague Stacey Higginbotham, is using machine learning models that have been taught using public medical research to uncover insights in online healthcare discussions. As I wrote about earlier this week, sophisticated genomics research is working to personalize drug prescriptions and enable physicians to recommend medication most appropriate for a patient’s genetic profile.