PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe is a data-driven social networking health site that enables its members to share condition, treatment, and symptom information in order to monitor their health over time and learn from real-world outcomes. Members are able to find and connect with patients like them, gain social support, and learn first-hand about ways to cope and manage. PatientsLikeMe aims to help patients answer the question: "Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?"

In April 2011, PatientsLikeMe announced that any patient with any condition is welcome to join the site. Previously, PatientsLikeMe had disease-specific communities for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's disease, fibromyalgia, HIV, chronic fatigue syndrome, mood disorders, epilepsy, and organ transplantation as well as for the rare conditions progressive supranuclear palsy, multiple system atrophy, and Devic's disease (neuromyelitis optica). In June 2009, PatientsLikeMe announced their first major partnership with the drug company UCB to develop a community for patients suffering from epilepsy, launched in early 2010.

The site was initially launched in 2005 when brothers James Heywood and Benjamin Heywood recognized the need for community-based information sharing around specific diseases when their brother Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS in 1998.

Physicians and researchers can access the site, enabling them to find out what treatments patients have tried, and to what success. The site has also introduced a number of projects that analyze clinical information given by the patients. Users of the site access the site for free. However the site is a commercial site as it aims to sell its users' data to drug and medical companies. The number of users is increasing. At October 2009, there were 45,000 registered patients on the site. As of June 2011, this number increased to over 108,000.

The company was named as one of the "15 Companies that Will Change the World" by Business 2.0 and CNN Money as well as #23 on Fast Company (magazine)'s 2010 list of Most Innovative Companies. It was also featured in a March 2008 New York Time Magazine article entitled "Practicing Patients", a May 2010 New York Times article entitled "When Patients Meet Online”, and in a December 2008 television segment with Sanjay Gupta for the CBS Evening News.