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.

VitalCrowd was created to make that collaboration possible – and scalable. Drawing on new models for crowdsourcing and Web-based collaboration, they hope 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 they know it needs to go.