Patients Like Me

PatientsLikeMe was co-founded in 2004 by three MIT engineers: brothers Benjamin and James Heywood and longtime friend Jeff Cole. Five years earlier, their brother and friend Stephen Heywood was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) at the age of 29. The Heywood family soon began searching the world over for ideas that would extend and improve Stephen’s life. Inspired by Stephen’s experiences, the co-founders and team conceptualized and built a health data-sharing platform that we believe can transform the way patients manage their own conditions, change the way industry conducts research and improve patient care.

PatientsLikeMe is now a ‘for-profit’ company, but not one with a ‘just for profit’ mission. The company follows four core values: putting patients first, promoting transparency (“no surprises”), fostering openness and creating “wow.” These values underlie the design and deployment of their platform, where patients share and learn from real-world, outcome-based health data.