Harnessing the power of healthcare crowdsourcing

by Kent Bottles All hospital system leaders are looking for new tools to help them cope with the rapid transformation of the American healthcare delivery system brought on by the Affordable Care Act and the transition of the payment system from fee for service to global, value-based programs. One tool that is increasingly mentioned as being underutilized by hospital systems is crowdsourcing. What is it? What is it not? What should healthcare leaders know about this disruptive technology? I first came across the term by reading Jeff Howe's 2006 Wired magazine article titled "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." In this still useful article, Howe described a creative process that addressed top-down organization goals by using an open, Internet-facilitated bottom-up approach. In addition to coining the portmanteau "crowdsourcing," Howe also illustrated his new concept by examining four examples: Threadless InnoCentive Amazon's Mechanical Turk iStockphoto According to Daren C. Brabham, the author of "Crowdsourcing," the characteristic components of crowdsourcing are an organization with a defined task, a community that will perform the task voluntarily, an online environment where the community and organization can communicate, and mutual benefit for the organization and the community. Brabham further defines crowdsourcing by what it is not. He does not think the following qualify as crowdsourcing: Open source production Common-based peer production like Wikipedia Market...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs