The CrowdMed Platform Taps Into the Wisdom of Vetted Medical Detectives to Bring Singles & Couples Closer to a Cure

The Short Version: CrowdMed has disrupted the healthcare industry by crowdsourcing medical diagnoses and offering patients a way to get second, third, and fourth opinions regarding mysterious ailments. The website supports a growing community of Medical Detectives who use their medical knowledge and sound judgment to assess cases posted by CrowdMed members. More than 80% of CrowdMed diagnoses have been reported accurate by patients. If you, a significant other, or friend suffer from an unknown illness, you can use CrowdMed to find the answers you need to seek proper treatment.

Jared Heyman founded CrowdMed in 2013 to use the wisdom of crowdsourcing to disrupt the healthcare industry and make a positive difference in people’s lives.”We all have a finite amount of knowledge that we can possess about any topic,” he said. “But crowds don’t have that limit. Crowds can be essentially infinitely wiser than individual experts.”

Now the forward-thinking Danyell Jones has joined the cause and become CEO of CrowdMed. She’s on a mission to use the crowdsourcing platform to save people a lot of time, pain, and money during the diagnosis process.

CrowdMed CEO Danyell Jones has helped patients get access to reliable medical advice.

Danyell has worked for major startups and biotech companies, and she has experience driving revenue from an executive level. She has taken the helm at CrowdMed to help the average patient get access to medical experts all over the world.

“CrowdMed has always emphasized putting the patient in charge of their own experience,” said Danyell.

CrowdMed invites medical professionals and students to earn some extra cash by accurately diagnosing mysterious ailments. Patients can share their symptoms and medical history, and then watch while dozens of medical experts discuss the case and suggest potential causes and treatments. These medical opinions are not an official diagnosis, but patients can use it as a framework during consultations with a primary care provider.

Individuals, couples, and families can use CrowdMed to arm themselves with the knowledge they need to get healthy. CrowdMed offers a simple platform where everyday people can find out what’s ailing them and decide what their next steps should be.

“We see a continued increase for personal control over one’s health,” said Danyell “This is what we believe people are yearning for at the moment, and we are constantly improving our technology to deliver a personalized experience to our users.”

In recent years, technology has played an increasingly important role in the healthcare system, and CrowdMed is one of the leading technologies empowering patients and medical professionals to improve the process from diagnosis to treatment. Patients submit mysterious medical cases by filling out a questionnaire and receive a diagnostic report based on an international, interdisciplinary team of medical experts supported by CrowdMed.

CrowdMed relies on its Medical Detectives to discuss potential diagnoses and come up with the right answer. These professionals build a solid reputation by delivering correct and valuable information to patients. A Medical Detective could be a med student, a neurologist, or a retired physician. The site doesn’t require its experts to have decades of experience or fancy degrees. Instead, the CrowdMed community judges its experts based on what they know and contribute.

Medical Detectives receive a reputation rating to indicate how accurate and helpful past patients found their advice. The higher their rating, the more high-profile cases they can work on. DR10 is the highest possible rating and recognizes someone of immense talent and expertise. One DR10 Medical Detective under the username Apteryx has earned over $42,528 by correctly diagnosing cases on CrowdMed.

Medical Detectives can build their reputations by solving cases on CrowdMed.

The CrowdMed team takes pains to ensure that its medical community represents some of the most knowledgeable and esteemed experts in the healthcare industry.

As Danyell said, “We know that the experience that is offered is only as good as the Medical Detectives on our platform, so we took several measures to improve features, usability, and the general experience of those working to solve cases on our platform.”

About 66% of CrowdMed’s Medical Detectives work in or study medicine, and 40% live in the U.S. Many of these individuals enjoy solving puzzles and providing healthcare advice, and they value the opportunity to help patients around the world. Plus, Medical Detectives earn cash rewards for every correct diagnosis, so it’s a great way to turn a profit.

“Those who help out with the cases on CrowdMed describe it as a rewarding experience,” Danyell said. “We wanted to be sure to let everyone know that they can also participate on the platform to help solve cases and potentially earn rewards.”

CrowdMed rewards Medical Detectives for correctly solving patient cases, but it strictly prohibits these experts from selling their own services or products to patients. Anyone caught using CrowdMed to solicit business will be permanently stripped of their reputation and removed from the platform.

CrowdMed has brought a new level of transparency to the healthcare industry by allowing medical experts to collaborate on cases in full view of their patients. Patients can see medical experts discussing their cases and get a good idea of what’s going on in the process. They can even invite people, including their own medical team, to get involved in the conversation.

On CrowdMed, multiple healthcare providers can participate on a patient’s case and approach the diagnosis from different perspectives and specialties. Their personalized health reports summarize the findings and suggest potential causes. It’s an affordable alternative to making costly visits to different specialists.

CrowdMed has assisted in diagnosing 1,000 unsolved medical cases.

“Healthcare, in general, remains one of the heaviest costs for American families, and the price of services continues to rise,” Danyell said. “If we can play a small part in helping to keep healthcare costs low, we would be consider that a win.”

CrowdMed can not only lower the cost of proper healthcare, but it can also facilitate informed conversations between patients and personal physicians. Patients can share their health reports with their doctors and bring a virtual interdisciplinary committee to the diagnostic process. This makes it easier for medical professionals to draw the right conclusion.

CrowdMed aims to change individual lives and challenge the healthcare industry to do better by the average patient. Its leadership and technology has been a game-changer in the diagnosis of unsolved medical cases.

“Healthcare can be a slow moving industry to effect change upon, but if you retain resiliency and have the right combination of science, technology, and noble purpose, great impact is possible,” Danyell said. “We all want the same thing — more affordable healthcare for everyone — and we can get there faster through effective collaboration.”

By using CrowdMed to get personalized medical advice, patients can cut costs significantly on doctor visits and follow-up diagnostics. CrowdMed offers three monthly subscription packages for patients with hard-to-solve medical cases. The standard plan charges $149 per month.

“When we first began CrowdMed, we really wanted to be sure that we were providing a valuable resource for individuals who have struggled with an undiagnosed or misdiagnosed medical condition,” Danyell said.

Individual diagnostics remain central to CrowdMed’s mission, but the team also has ambitions to make a larger impact by working with large healthcare systems as well as employers. Some CrowdMed costs are eligible for reimbursement through Flexible Savings Accounts (FSAs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).



Over the years, the CrowdMed team has been humbled by the stories from patients who said their symptoms have gone away or their quality of life has improved because of the advice disseminated by CrowdMed’s medical experts.

Dianna Cleaveland said her illness made her give up biking, hiking, singing and socializing. She went to multiple specialists and received multiple contradictory diagnoses before finding CrowdMed. Her medical report made it clear to her that she has an immune deficiency. “People who submit to CrowdMed are at their rope’s end,” Dianna said. “CrowdMed fills a need that no doctor can fill.”

The CrowdMed team are proud of stories like Dianna’s and work hard to ensure patients can understand and improve their health. More than 75% of CrowdMed patients have had their CrowdMed diagnosis confirmed by their physicians.

Jared founded CrowdMed on the premise that a single doctor can’t have all the answers, but a crowd of medical experts can. As CEO, Danyell continues pushing the boundaries of traditional medical care and finding new ways to make accurate diagnoses much easier to come by.

For the last six years, CrowdMed has used the wisdom of crowdsourcing to empower singles, couples, and families to get answers and take action to treat a mysterious illness.

Thanks to CrowdMed’s affordable online consultations, patients can now draw from a wealth of information when speaking to their own primary care giver. Danyell predicts that such innovative technologies will transform the healthcare industry in the coming years.

“We are excited to see the pivot to patient-centered care,” she said. “The established healthcare community seems to be more receptive than ever to changing, adapting, and using some of the most recent advancements out there to solve medicine’s biggest challenges. We think that this will be a year of heavy adoption for innovations across the healthcare spectrum.”