Health Care Crowds: Collective Intelligence in Public Health
This work provides an incremental overview of collective intelligence applications in public health, identifying current uses and suggesting future research directions.
The paper conducted a systematic literature review of 110 studies to explore how crowdsourcing is used in public health, finding applications in health promotion, research, and maintenance across three known crowdsourcing forms.
For what purposes are crowds being implemented in health care? Which crowdsourcing methods are being used? This work begins to answer these questions by reporting the early results of a systematic literature review of 110 pieces of relevant research. The results of this exploratory research in progress reveals that collective intelligence outcomes are being generated in three broad categories of public health care; health promotion, health research, and health maintenance, using all three known forms of crowdsourcing. Stemming from this fundamental analysis, some potential implications of the research are discussed and useful future research is outlined.