In our current months-long collaboration with CollectiveGood, Team A has been instrumental in developing CollectiveGood MD, an innovative application designed to provide physicians worldwide with access to a collaborative network for second medical opinions. This project is aligned with a mission to meet the pressing needs of the medical community, demonstrating our commitment to making a difference.
There is a growing body of evidence in medicine that highlights the superiority of diagnostic opinions derived from collective intelligence. In urban areas, physicians can easily tap into extensive networks, while rural areas face challenges due to isolation and limited connections. This is where CollectiveGood MD bridges the gap. By providing a collaborative network of medical opinions, medical professionals from all backgrounds can get second opinions on their diagnoses and practice, improving the expected prognosis.
However, CollectiveGood MD right now has very little data to work with, having to use existing case studies from the web. These case studies could be a little biased (selection bias), and are limited in volume. The final big limitation with only getting existing cases from the web is administrators would have to manually sanitize data to fit their requirements, which will not work at scale. Medical professionals are also not able to get specific second opinions on their own cases, which provides a barrier to the usefulness and accuracy of this application.
We aim to assist CollectiveGood MD in their mission by providing a website where admins can upload cases, whether from the web or specific cases, and have users input and sanitize the data.
Our project addresses the need for accessible collective intelligence for medical professionals. In the age of big data and worldwide interconnectivity we live in, there is no reason the medical world should not keep up and even surpass other industries. Our work helps to advance this by enabling the mass collection and collaboration of data which hopefully in the future, can be used by multiple organizations within the UNC system and eventually expand to more audiences. This work will directly affect physicians within the system by enabling them to get second and third opinions, as well as help them hone their skills by testing their diagnoses against previous cases. This in turn will also help many patients as it can allow for quicker and more accurate diagnoses so that they can get treatment more efficiently.