Nearly 200,000 PatientsLikeMe members have created and shared their own medical records, often using standardized questionnaires or tests they conducted themselves. The new platform will include tools for developing standardized measurements for additional diseases, tools to evaluate and refine those measurements, and mechanisms for licensing the data and for open-sourcing the measurements used to collect the data under a Creative Commons license.

The plan, announced at the TED Conference Monday, is to rapidly accelerate the spread of medical data now hoarded by private companies, locked down by privacy laws, and collected using often proprietary and commercially licensed measurement systems.

Ref: Social Network Could Revolutionize Disease Treatment – Wired
Ref: PatientsLikeMe