Based out of Tel Aviv, Stuffthatworks is a patient community platform that harnesses crowdsourcing and AI technology to empower people to share their experiences in an organised way to discover which treatments work best and for whom.
Raised €7.7M funding
Recently, the company has raised $9 million (approx €7.7 million) in seed funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, 83North, and Ofek Ventures.
Yael Elish, CEO, and co-founder of StuffThatWorks said: “People are the ones that hold in-depth knowledge about themselves, their condition, and the way treatments affect them. Collecting this knowledge in an organized and structured way across is the only way to compare effectiveness in scale. And when that’s done across all chronic conditions it creates a gold mine of data that can dramatically advance and facilitate research to the benefit of both the patient and the medical community.”
Place to share experience in a structured way!
Seeing a doctor or specialist, often being dissatisfied with the level of improvement – people with the chronic disease usually search for other people’s experiences online in the hopes of finding something that may work better.
While millions of people share their personal treatment stories online there’s no way to make sense of it all. In this case, StuffThatWorks solves this by providing patients with a place to share their experiences in a structured way that’s optimised for analysis. In fact, the company’s proprietary AI transforms the data shared into personalized treatment effectiveness insights.
Notably, the more contributors the smarter and more personalized the insights get. The data formed becomes available to everyone and is updated in real-time, along the process.
110 condition communities as of now
At present, there are already 110 condition communities open on StuffThatWorks, with nearly 180,000 contributors sharing over 10 million shared data points and 150K experience-based content-rich pages all while in stealth mode.
As per the company claims, this platform is relevant for all chronic conditions right from diabetes and ADHD to rare and orphan diseases that receive little attention as well. If the community for a particular condition hasn’t been created yet, anyone can open it within minutes and invite others to take the survey and contribute too.
How Stuffthatworks born?
StuffThatWorks was co-founded by Yael Elish, Ron Held, and Yossi Synett. Months of online research, driven by the belief that others, somewhere, must have experienced something similar, led to the discovery of a medical treatment that was more effective than what was prescribed.
Similar to how Waze sought to empower people to build maps and share data to help each other bypass traffic, here, too, crowdsourcing presents the optimal solution to a large-scale problem.
Adam Fisher, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said: “With more than half of the world’s populations suffering from at least one chronic condition, chronic illness is a rapidly growing global epidemic. With more than half of the world’s populations suffering from at least one chronic condition, chronic illness is a rapidly growing global epidemic.
StuffThatWorks is collaborating with a limited number of researchers, medical organizations, and patient advocacy groups on Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) research.
Main image credits: StuffThatWorks