PatientsLikeMe: Patients Helping Patients Live Better Everyday

This is the story of how a brother inspired an engineer to build a website that grew to help and transform the lives of many patients around the world. Inspired by his brother who was diagnosed with ALS, Jamie Heywood, an MIT-trained mechanical engineer, built a website called Patients Like Me that uses the power of collective information sharing to have such an impact.

Started as a place to share stories of personal illnesses, medication and treatment, Jamie tells us the story of how Patients Like Me grew into so much more, with the power to help explain and predict an illness' progress based on different treatment and medications, and even to contribute to and potentially accelerate medical research. The best part of the site? All that information is available to every one of its users.

By Su Yuen, CHIN (suyuen@gmail.com)