Crowdsource Public Health Complaints?

Haven’t been blogging much at all – I have a lot of ideas in public health and biotech that I’d like to document. Most of them probably frivolous, but if telling people about your ideas is half the battle in the war against (or for) serendipity, let this blog be a testament to that.

A lot of medical problems are caused by underlying social maltreatment. A doctor continuously treats a patient who comes in with asthma but never treats the underlying cause – perhaps dust in the household or a polluted neighborhood. The lead leaking into the water pipes lead to lead poisoning, but the landlord doesn’t do anything and nor does the doctor (and how could they, doctors are overwhelmed with patients – they don’t have time to treat the very non-medical underlying causes of ailments).

I’m not saying all medical problems are due to underlying social problems, but I’m sure many are – especially in lower income areas. And because many landlords don’t resolve issues from complaints, why don’t we create an alternative platform for drawing attention to problems? Create an app that simply allows you to take a picture of your problem and distribute it over this specialized network. People can chime in, comment, get angry and cause some change (similar to CitySourced – which lets you complain about local problems via your iPhone or Android app).

Give them a voice, and crowdsource the feedback. Of course there are a lot of issues with this idea. This does not apply to all medical ailments or social problems. And the potential audeince for this idea – the urban poor mostly – probably can’t afford access to smartphones or the app market (is this true?). Even more fundamentally, Can we address problems like these through apps or do apps tend to address richer audiences?

- Ariq