Doing good, part 2

I think I am going to start a regular series on this.  How people are using information for betterment of society.  I began by talking of INCOIS and tsunami warning.  Today I want to talk about PatientsLikeMe.  I first came across this when Marty Tannenbaum gave a lecture at Almaden.  Marty, himself a great marketplace creator from his e-commerce, CommerceNet days, mentioned several other "ventures" of information freeing up medical decision making, and gave PatientsLikeMe as one of the examples.

Yesterday's NYT magazine had a long article on it.  Go read it.  The synopsis is simple.  Think match.com for patients with rare diseases.  That's it.  And do good by not asking for subscriptions, or even ads.  Perhaps get the pharmas to benefit from the information, and subsidise it.  There is a dark cloud in all of this -- not privacy or HIPPA, but whether patients can or should dismabiguate information without the help of their doctors.  But my view is -- freeing up information always has the technology run ahead of the "ethics", "laws" and "controls."  Eventually they catch up.