When I was growing up, I suffered from a pretty bad case of asthma. I didn’t have scary attacks like some people do, but I had triggers that would have me wheezing for hours. Running always did it. So did cigarette smoke. Sometimes it was freshly cut grass, or some other unknown allergen. If I caught a cold, it was significantly worse because of the way my lungs reacted. I saw doctors, I got tests (I was apparently operating at half of normal lung capacity), and I tried medications. Nothing really helped, and a lot of the medications had side effects that made me feel even worse. Luckily, I eventually outgrew my asthma, but I wonder if I could have dealt with it more effectively if I had the opportunity to interact with other kids who were in a similar situation. A site like PatientsLikeMe would have been perfect. Put simply, it’s an online community for patients with similar conditions, doctors, and organizations to interact and share experiences. The Cambridge, MA based company was started in 2004 by 3 MIT engineers who had their lives touched by ALS, and it’s the kind of “healthcare reform” that nobody can argue against—by the patients and for the patients.
My favorite thing about PatientsLikeMe is their business model. Instead of shilling for drug companies and letting them blast you with crappy ads about their drugs that have worse side effects than the problems that they cure, PatientsLikeMe has come up with a more creative approach to driving revenue. They’ve entered “partnerships with healthcare providers that use anonymized data from and permission-based access to the PatientsLikeMe community to drive treatment research and improve medical care.” That means that users aren’t only gaining an emotional and informational boost by being members of PatientsLikeMe. They’re also helping drive forward medical research. If PatientsLikeMe sounds like the kind of company that you’d like to be a part of, then you should check out their Careers page. I haven’t seen any mention of internships on their site or elsewhere online, but if you have interest in managing online communities and a background in medicine/healthcare, then it’d be hard to find a better fit. PatientsLikeMe has a You Tell Us job listed, which means that you can tell them just what kind of internship they should create for you. Pretty cool.
Links to Help You Begin Your Research
Have you ever used PatientsLikeMe?
Do I Know Anyone at PatientsLikeMe? - Check LinkedIn | Check Facebook
Tags: community manager, healthcare, Internships, Massachusetts, medicine, research, social media, social networking
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