StuffThatWorks

StuffThatWorks operates a health platform centered on patient-reported outcomes, leveraging crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze treatment effectiveness for chronic conditions. The company was established in 2018 and is based in Tel Aviv. The inspiration for the company came from CEO Yael Elish's personal experience assisting a family member, where independent research led to discovering more effective treatments than those initially prescribed. This experience highlighted the absence of a unified database to compare the roughly 300 potential treatments available for any given disease.

The company was co-founded by CEO Yael Elish, Chief Data Scientist Yossi Synett, and Ron Held. Elish has a strong background in building crowdsourced, consumer-facing products, notably as the former head of product at Waze from its early stages through its acquisition by Google. Synett's expertise is in data analysis, having previously served as VP of Research at Kenshoo. This collective experience in crowdsourcing and data science forms the foundation of the company's approach.

StuffThatWorks' core service is a platform where individuals with chronic conditions can share their experiences in a structured format through detailed questionnaires. This collected data, which includes information on symptoms, aggravating factors, and treatments, is then processed by machine learning algorithms. As the volume of data grows for a specific condition, the platform can begin to rank treatment effectiveness and identify which therapies work best for particular patient subgroups. The platform operates on a freemium model for some services, offering free access for up to 100 patients for clinics and for academic research, while also providing a SaaS-based enterprise solution. In February 2023, the company launched "StuffThatWorks for Life Sciences," a platform designed to help pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations (CROs) with clinical trial recruitment by providing access to its extensive real-world evidence database. This service allows partners to identify and engage with specific patient populations for studies, surveys, and awareness campaigns through a customizable dashboard.

The company's primary clients are patients seeking to understand their conditions, as well as researchers, medical organizations, patient advocacy groups, and life science companies. By structuring and analyzing patient-provided data at a large scale, the platform generates a continuously updated knowledge base that can facilitate research and provide insights that are often missing from traditional clinical settings. The business model generates revenue through its SaaS platform for life science partners and offers custom research and real-time data analysis services. Keywords: patient-reported outcomes, crowdsourced health data, machine learning in healthcare, chronic conditions treatment, real-world evidence, clinical trial recruitment, patient-centric data, health data analytics, treatment effectiveness, Yael Elish, Yossi Synett, Waze alumni, personalized medicine, digital health platform, patient communities, PRO research, data-driven healthcare, health-tech, life sciences data, patient journey insights, medical data analysis, Tel Aviv startup