We are so excited!

CureTogether’s entry into the Ashoka Changemakers patient empowerment competition won the Early Entry Prize for best idea entered by the early deadline!

From the competition website:

The Amgen Foundation is supporting the Patients| Choices| Empowerment competition with Ashoka’s Changemakers to answer the question of how we can elevate patients’ voices to improve health outcomes globally.

Submit your solutions, or nominate a project, in this challenge that empowers patients to make decisions with confidence and clarity, in concert with people who care and can help.

Congratulations to the Early Entry Prize winner: CureTogether – Crowdsourced Patient Experience. Learn how they are working to empower patients HERE.

Prizes: Enter before the competition deadline of 5PM EDT on September 29, 2010 and you may be one of three winners that receive USD $10,000 to advance your project.

If you have a minute, please help by leaving a comment on our entry page - it will help us have a better chance of winning the competition.

Thank you for your help!

IFTF’s HealthCare 2020 map – click here for the full version

Our friends over at Institute for the Future have released their vision of health and healthcare in 2020. We’re excited that CureTogether is included on their map!

They placed CureTogether at the intersection of taking a Commons approach (self-organized participatory solutions that bring a new culture of cooperation) to Making Information Actionable (filtering and integrating health-related information in meaningful ways).

What do you think of their vision for the future of health and healthcare?

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Imagine being able to talk to someone who shares the same 7 conditions you have. What if they’re also your age? They could be going through the same thing every day that you do.

You start to wonder, is their experience the same as yours? Do they have the same symptoms? What treatments are they trying? Do they also have the same side effects as you?

In a new feature released at CureTogether this week, now you can not only find people that are your closest health matches, but you can send them a private message to ask them these questions. They can respond privately to you, and you can both choose what information to share with each other.

To start talking, just log in to CureTogether, and click on the “Connect” link on the right menu of your home page. You’ll see a list of people to connect with and a “Send a private message” button to click.

Please let us know how you like this new feature and how we can improve it. We hope it helps. Happy connecting!!

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We’re excited to announce a new development at CureTogether. Our most active contributing members have been upgraded to official Curators!

Amazing people like Ricky Buchanan in Melbourne, Australia (pictured above and found at http://notdoneliving.net/) are combing through CureTogether data. They are carefully checking for accuracy, duplicate entries, and generally helping to make sure that the information we have for our over 500 conditions is the highest quality it can be. This enables more discoveries that we can share with our condition communities and the larger public.

Ricky and people like her are the reason CureTogether was started, and we are so grateful and glad to welcome the support of these inspiring heroes. Thank you!!

Do you have a skin disease? If you do, please join the race.

CureTogether is excited to announce a new research project we’re collaborating on. Researchers Suephy Chen, Adam Sperduto, and Bob Swerlick at Emory University are doing a study to compare whether online recruiting methods can beat their traditional in-clinic recruiting methods.

Basically, they want to see whether CureTogether or in-person methods can get more people to answer a skin disease survey. Here’s your chance to help show the power of online communities.

“Please click here if you have been diagnosed with eczema/atopic dermatitis, seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, rosacea, or acne and would like to learn more about participating in a clinic research study conducted by the Emory University School of Medicine Department of Dermatology. Thank you!”

We’ll keep you posted on how the race goes!

This press release went out this morning:

CureTogether, an online social health community, announced today the launch of its Autism treatment study. CureTogether will provide an online venue for parents with Autistic children to anonymously share and rate the success of their treatments.

“CureTogether is here to do good; we’ve adopted an open-source philosophy for health research,” said CureTogether co-founder Daniel Reda. “Patients and parents have so much knowledge and expertise to share with each other and with the world.”

CureTogether is interested in collecting information about any and all treatments tried including: Anxiety and Depression medications, Chelation and IV therapies, Glutathione, Naltrexone, EDTA, DMPS, DMSA, Detoxification, vitamins B-12, B-6, supplements, Gluten-Free and Casein-Free Diets, Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatments, Stem Cell Therapy, Play Therapy, Music Therapy, etc.

The CureTogether website also allows patients and parents to add therapies that may not be listed. CureTogether’s goal is to provide data back to the Autism community as to the most effective treatment options. Curetogether is completely impartial and not affiliated with any pharmaceutical or healthcare supplier.

Please visit http://www.curetogether.com/autism to participate in the study.

About Autism
Autism is a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Autism is defined by a certain set of behaviors and is a “spectrum disorder” that affects individuals differently and to varying degrees. There is no known single cause for Autism. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in every 110 births in the United States and almost 1 in 70 boys is affected by Autism.

About CureTogether, Inc.
CureTogether is a website that helps people anonymously track and compare health data, to better understand their bodies, make more informed treatment decisions and contribute data to research. CureTogether has been featured in Wired (“Empowering Patients”), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek (“Innovative”). For more information, please visit www.curetogether.com/blog/about or send an email to press(at)curetogether(dot)com.

CureTogether is 1 year old this month! To celebrate and thank our amazing members and supporters, we’re giving away free T-shirts.

Create a video (under 1 minute) on how you cured yourself, how CureTogether has helped you, or any cure-related theme. The best 20 videos get this beautiful T-shirt!

To enter, upload your entry to YouTube or any video-sharing site by August 13 and send the link to Alexandra at alexandra@curetogether.com.

Good luck!

News Update

CureTogether was also mentioned in these articles recently – many thanks to the authors and readers who keep encouraging this work!

Wired: “Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365“

Wall Street Journal: “Health Data Proves Contagious on Social Media”

Brainandspinalcord.org: “A Novel Approach to Self-Empowered Healthcare“

Last week Daniel did a live podcast interview with John Mack for the Pharma Marketing Blog. He talks about how CureTogether got started and what patients are discovering on the site. Here’s the streaming audio below (about 15 minutes long).

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At long last, we’re releasing recent videos of both of us speaking at the Quantified Self meetups.

Daniel gives a quick, early overview of CureTogether from December 2008, and Alexandra talks about who to trust for health information in March 2009.

Enjoy!

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Alexandra Carmichael on trust and health information sources from Kevin Kelly on Vimeo.

The second video in a series of two famous buddies discussing random things, in the clip below Tim and Kevin talk about music, open source clinical trials, CureTogether (about half way through), and their favorite knives. The open source health discussion is impressive, the rest is good fun. And check out Tim’s shoes!

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Random Episode Numero 2 from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.