I can't see this being useful for consumers directly. I'm not going to pay to optimize the efficacy of the pills I get for a headache or heartburn or bloating or whatever. If I choose one brand/compound over another and it's 20% better...what's that worth? $5/year? Maybe?
I can see this being useful for problems that are not trivial. Heart medication. Cancer drugs. HIV medication. The sort of stuff where a 20% difference in efficacy is not the difference between me having an extra cup of coffee or not—it's the difference between an extra year on medication and worse side effects or not (or even life and death).
But even then, you're not selling to patients—it seems super unethical (or at least immoral) to profit from folks with serious illness who want to know what's best going to keep them from dying. You sell this to the healthcare industry. But like the post says, doctors don't...really care. Not that they shouldn't care, but they don't benefit personally, and the patients aren't going to pay them more for it, and the industry will (slowly) get better on its own in the long term. That doesn't feel great.
So to me, it seems almost obvious that the customer here is the pharmaceutical companies. They've got money to burn. They pay HUGE amounts of money for display ads and instagram stories which literally don't even tell you what the damn drug does. During Ru Paul's Drag Race this past week there was an ad for a medication which didn't mention what it treats or who could take it.
Make the data free to consumers and doctors. Hire someone to call every cardiologist and HIV specialist and oncologist and whoever else in eastern standard time. "Hey, I've got this thing that will tell you what's likely the best drug for patients. It's free to use, and we'll send you a free mug after you use it 100 times." Then you call up every pharmaceutical company you can find and say "Hey friends. We'll put up a profile page for each of your drugs and make sure they're represented with independently verified data. We've called X thousand doctors who will be using this. Pay us $Xk/year and we'll make this happen."
You could probably do the same thing for healthcare companies (e.g., Kaiser): "pay for a license for all of your doctors and you'll have better health outcomes for your patients."
This is obviously untested, but if you exclude the doctors and the patients as potential customers, you're left with a pile of companies with a lot of money. I would love to hear from OP why this wasn't something they pursued.
I can see this being useful for problems that are not trivial. Heart medication. Cancer drugs. HIV medication. The sort of stuff where a 20% difference in efficacy is not the difference between me having an extra cup of coffee or not—it's the difference between an extra year on medication and worse side effects or not (or even life and death).
But even then, you're not selling to patients—it seems super unethical (or at least immoral) to profit from folks with serious illness who want to know what's best going to keep them from dying. You sell this to the healthcare industry. But like the post says, doctors don't...really care. Not that they shouldn't care, but they don't benefit personally, and the patients aren't going to pay them more for it, and the industry will (slowly) get better on its own in the long term. That doesn't feel great.
So to me, it seems almost obvious that the customer here is the pharmaceutical companies. They've got money to burn. They pay HUGE amounts of money for display ads and instagram stories which literally don't even tell you what the damn drug does. During Ru Paul's Drag Race this past week there was an ad for a medication which didn't mention what it treats or who could take it.
Make the data free to consumers and doctors. Hire someone to call every cardiologist and HIV specialist and oncologist and whoever else in eastern standard time. "Hey, I've got this thing that will tell you what's likely the best drug for patients. It's free to use, and we'll send you a free mug after you use it 100 times." Then you call up every pharmaceutical company you can find and say "Hey friends. We'll put up a profile page for each of your drugs and make sure they're represented with independently verified data. We've called X thousand doctors who will be using this. Pay us $Xk/year and we'll make this happen."
You could probably do the same thing for healthcare companies (e.g., Kaiser): "pay for a license for all of your doctors and you'll have better health outcomes for your patients."
This is obviously untested, but if you exclude the doctors and the patients as potential customers, you're left with a pile of companies with a lot of money. I would love to hear from OP why this wasn't something they pursued.