title: Crowdsourcing knowledge discovery and innovations in medicine.
abstract: Clinicians face difficult treatment decisions in contexts that are not well addressed by available evidence as formulated based on research. The digitization of medicine provides an opportunity for clinicians to collaborate with researchers and data scientists on solutions to previously ambiguous and seemingly insolvable questions. But these groups tend to work in isolated environments, and do not communicate or interact effectively. Clinicians are typically buried in the weeds and exigencies of daily practice such that they do not recognize or act on ways to improve knowledge discovery. Researchers may not be able to identify the gaps in clinical knowledge. For data scientists, the main challenge is discerning what is relevant in a domain that is both unfamiliar and complex. Each type of domain expert can contribute skills unavailable to the other groups. "Health hackathons" and "data marathons", in which diverse participants work together, can leverage the current ready availability of digital data to discover new knowledge. Utilizing the complementary skills and expertise of these talented, but functionally divided groups, innovations are formulated at the systems level. As a result, the knowledge discovery process is simultaneously democratized and improved, real problems are solved, cross-disciplinary collaboration is supported, and innovations are enabled.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, Laboratory of Computational Physiology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States. lceli@mit.edu.
authors.forename: Leo Anthony
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6712-6626
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Celi
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2025-6591
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ippolito
authors.forename: Robert A
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9914-6082
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Montgomery
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4172-4446
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Moses
authors.forename: David J
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4855-4283
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Stone
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000639:trends*; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D063045:Crowdsourcing / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D062069:Inventions; D019359:Knowledge
keywords: crowdsourcing; hackathon; innovation; knowledge discovery