Patient's Social Network: Reaping Value from Transparency

Posting the link to an interesting article about a new startup called PatientsLikeMe which is a social media support group for patients with chronic disease that provides data and analysis after removing personal identifiable elements of the shared information. The article describes an instance where the consensus of the site-derived data pre-dated the published conclusion of a formal study by over a year.  The article and company are interesting in that they show one approach for supporting patients and handling privacy concerns while making data available for analysis. A glimpse of future benefits of  the HIE? I hope so!