Vital Crowd is an experiment, driven by passion, informed by experience and catalyzed by frustration with the ‘way things work’ in health care research and design.
While more and more people are realizing that we need those who live within the confines of the health care system to participate in the design of health research, finding a way to do that has been challenging. Researchers are relying on one-off focus groups or ad hoc conversations with patients or caregivers, followed by limited opportunities to collaborate in defining the actual protocol or providing insights on methods. What’s lacking is a way to enable meaningful, ongoing collaboration between the health care community and the researchers who seek to understand it.
Vital Crowd was created to make that collaboration possible – and scalable. Drawing on new models for crowdsourcing and Web-based collaboration, Vital Crowd hopes to bring the full health care community – patients, caregivers, community physicians, researchers, funders and developers alike – into a collaborative, efficient tool that takes health care research where we know it needs to go.
Whitney provided community curation, communications, brand development, research, and overall project strategy.