Interview with Ben Heywood, CEO of PatientsLikeMe
by David Williams
On the Health Business Blog, I interviewed PatientsLikeMe CEO and co-founder Ben Heywood.
The online community enables patients with serious illnesses to build content-rich connections to similar patients. Patients are motivated to provide all the relevant information about themselves and to stick with the site over time to help one another. As a consequence, PatientsLikeMe users collectively generate robust data sets that have the potential to generate meaningful insights for researchers and commercial entities. That leads to some interesting business opportunities for the company.
We talked about the differences between PatientsLikeMe and other Health 2.0 communities, the extension of the platform from the original focus on ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) to a broader set of conditions, the company’s Openness Philosophy, and how the company intends to monetize its offering without alienating its users.
You can hear the interview here.
