Waze founder starts site for chronic disease treatments

Some 6.5 billion people suffer from any of around 10,000 chronic conditions, each with an average of 300 possible treatments. As such, some of these individuals are treated on a trial-and-error basis, as there is no effective, timely and affordable way to compare all these treatment modalities. Until now. Made-in-Israel “StuffThatWorks” is the first-ever artificial intelligence-based crowdsourcing platform for the treatment of chronic conditions. It offers an ability to effectively understand real world treatment information in an organized way.

The company, launched in July 2020, was developed by CEO Yael Elish and Chief Data Scientist Yossi Synett. Elish was on the Waze founding team, where she drove the overall product strategy that led the company from “User One” to one of the world’s most notable crowdsourcing endeavors.

She also co-founded eSnips and NetSnippet, and was part of the senior management team that took Commtouch to its successful NASDAQ IPO in 2000.

Already, StuffThatWorks has 1.2 million members – including 700,000 active contributors, among them 7,000 medical practitioners – and data on more than 400 chronic conditions. The majority of users are from the United States and other English-speaking countries.

Conditions range from diabetes and heart disease to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), asthma and Crohn’s disease.

Elish said the user community is growing by an average of 5,000 members a day.

StuffThatWorks secured $9 million in seed funding.

“When talking about chronic conditions, one of the big problems is what is going to work for me,” Elish explained. “There are many, many possible treatments for a lot of chronic conditions and no one really knows what is going to work for individuals.”

Elish became passionate about the idea of launching the company after her young daughter developed a condition that kept getting worse despite the different treatments her doctor and other medical experts were trying. Although not life-threatening, the disease was taking a heavy toll on her family’s life. Ultimately, she crowdsourced a recommendation and it worked.

“Half of Facebook groups are health-related,” Elish told The Jerusalem Post. “People are turning to each other, realizing they want to hear from other people like them… People know most about themselves, what they tried, what worked and what did not work. Once they find success, they will share any information to help others – often even medical records – whatever is needed.”

The users who join StuffThatWorks are asked to share a substantial amount of personal information and therefore the privacy policy is detailed and explicit. Active contributors share their age, gender, the age of disease onset, diagnoses, treatments tried, what worked and what didn’t, symptoms, triggers and lifestyle descriptions like stress level – among other things.

The data, first stripped of any personal details or identifiers, is structured and organized via sophisticated AI and becomes available to those who want to access it. This can be people with their own chronic conditions, doctors or researchers.

Active contributors agree to share their personal information and can also access some of the information of others like them. They can send direct messages or join a message board.

“The more people join, the more personalized the system becomes,” Elish said. “People can ask questions and can have a dialogue.”

Already, the initial data has revealed severe gaps in some cases, such as in the case of some chronic diseases where the top three most effective treatments do not even appear in the top 10 list of most tried modalities.

“Sometimes this is understandable because the most effective treatment is very radical or invasive,” Elish said.

Other times, this is not the case. StuffThatWorks also enables users to see often related or co-existing conditions, side effects of conditions and side effects from the treatments of certain conditions. Everything can be analyzed cross-condition. It also includes a mapping of all chronic conditions and the relations between them.

Users can also compare between countries. This week, Elish said, StuffThatWorks is releasing data about detrimental treatments, too.

“This is completely pro-people,” she said. “The angle here is what we need as people – something better and more informative than what is out there.”