Raising the Bar on Medical Excellence: The Power of Crowdsourcing

Active Sermo community member, Dr. Linda Girgis, M.D., a family practitioner in New Jersey has discovered the power of crowdsourcing to help improve patient care and outcomes.  ~~

As my last patient leaves the office for the day I marvel at all the patients coming in with new, wearable technologies pinned, wrapped and snapped onto their bodies.  It is an entirely new stream of data, all this body tracking, and it will just be added to the stream of information already coming at me daily.  I am bombarded by emails of new guidelines and mandates that seem to change from one week to the next.

Many doctors feel isolated and sometimes overwhelmed from it all. But I’m not one of them I have help and support online from my fellow physicians in the form of clinical crowdsourcing.

What exactly is crowdsourcing and how does it help physicians like me?

Popular in software, engineering and consumer product circles, online crowdsourcing communities have similar traits:

–        Like-minded individuals seeking to solve a commonly identified challenge or problem;

–        A diversity of perspectives that combine to provide more complete, elegant solutions than when people work independently;

–        A shared sense of mission and purpose, in which people give and get help.

Perhaps more than any other profession, doctors rely on being part of a physical network of specialists and facilities to provide patients the best care possible. Ironically, being a doctor might also qualify as one of the most isolated and specialized professions. To address this unbalanced equation for myself, I have been a long-time member of one such crowdsourcing community – Sermo – where doctors get feedback on tough cases 24/7.

For instance, I recently posted a case of a child with painful splenomegaly. I received feedback from several different specialties within minutes.  This information helped me decide which tests should be done and helped me create a treatment plan.  Getting this information so quickly, nearly instantaneously, clearly helped improve the care my patient received.

Benefits of clinical crowdsourcing

It’s about time. Doctors need fast answers. My time is my patient’s time. The more time I’m spending away from patients lining up potentially unnecessary referrals and consults, the more time those patients are out of work or school, or simply out of happiness.

Crowdsourcing cases in a professionally safe environment can result in patients receiving confirmed, cross-checked diagnoses and treatment plans by multiple doctors from a variety of specialties – within minutes. Feedback from many doctors who have posted cases on Sermo show that clinical crowdsourcing saved our patients time and our system money by avoiding inefficient paths to diagnosis and treatment.

Information overload strikes all of us. Medical knowledge is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. Doctors need to collaborate to stay current for our patients’ sake and to quickly adjust to dramatic changes in treatment guidelines and new data.

You can’t just Google medicine.   Patients often don’t comply with doctors’ orders.  We have to go beyond  “cookbook” medicine, and seek reasonable, experienced minds to think through difficult and diverse cases

Help is in our nature.  No matter how the media portrays us, We all have our patients’ best interests at heart. The common portrayal of the TV doctor as a self-centered, brilliant-but-loveably dysfunctional person who thinks they can drive a patient to wellness alone is a damaging myth.  Almost all doctors put patient outcomes first and instinctively work in team settings to get the best information.

Let’s change the message from loner MD to a tight-knit community of physicians who are looking for the best possible patient outcomes.  Online clinical crowdsourcing achieves this and comes quite naturally to the doctors who take the leap. From this perspective, it belongs in every physician’s toolkit.

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Dr. Linda Girgis MD, FAAFP is a family physician that treats patients in South River, New Jersey and its surrounding communities. She holds board certification from the American Board of Family Medicine and is affiliated with both St. Peter’s University Hospital and Raritan Bay Hospital. Dr. Girgis also collaborates closely with Rutgers University, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), and other universities and medical schools where she teaches medical students and residents.