In mid-August, a16z (the podcast sponsored by leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz) had an interview titled "The Taxonomy of Collective Knowledge," which featured discussion of a SF entity called The Human Diagnosis Project. (Podcast here). How do we organize medical knowledge, patient facts, and create a diagnosis from it? Books have been written about this for decades; see the 2015 book by Institute of Medicine (here). There's an article on diagnosis in the August 21, 2017, JAMA (here). Now AI approaches are springing up in multiple quarters.
>> Addendum: On September 13, the Human Diagnosis Project was featured in an article by Laura Landro in WSJ - here.
>> Addendum: On January 24, 2018, an article in JAMA on the Human Diagnosis Project - here.
>> Addendum: On September 13, the Human Diagnosis Project was featured in an article by Laura Landro in WSJ - here.
>> Addendum: On January 24, 2018, an article in JAMA on the Human Diagnosis Project - here.
For one early entry point on The Human Diagnosis Project entity, see the February 2017 Forbes article, "Building a Collective Super-Intelligence for Doctors and Patients Around the World" - here. Ann Field writes,
“We are creating a collective superintelligence,” says Jay Komarneni, founder and Chair of The Human Diagnosis Project, otherwise known as Human Dx, which has nonprofit and for-profit arms. “We’re working at the intersection of humans, machines and organizations to create a truly powerful online system that provides best insights into patients.”The main webpage for Human Diagnosis Project is here. See also an article at MacArthur Foundation (here).
As of now, according to Komarneni, the system includes “hundreds of thousands” of cases from thousands of doctors from 60 countries and over 400 institutions. Komarneni started conceptualizing the project in 2012 and he and his team have been building the technology and community since 2013.
The effort has the support of AMA and others (see Healthcare IT News, here, and Fierce Healthcare, here), but some articles are skeptical at best (see Fierce Healthcare, here, and Axios, here). See also a subscription article August 30 at Stat Plus, here.
Human Diagnosis Project even shows up on Red Bull News (here).
See a long interview with the founder Jay Komarneni at "Business of Giving," here. Komarneni holds an MBA and a MS in Biotechnology from Wharton and an MS in Global Health Science from Oxford (bio here).
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Not directly related to Human Diagnosis Project, see a Freakanomics podcast on diagnostics and misdiagnosis, here.
