MetaMed
| Private | |
| Industry | Managed health care |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Defunct | April 2015 |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, USA |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Jaan Tallinn - Founder |
| Products | Personalized medical research |
| Website | www.metamed.com |
MetaMed Research was[1] a medical consulting firm aiming to provide high-end personalized medical research services. It was founded in 2012 by Michael Vassar (previously of the Singularity Institute[2]),[3] Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa),[4][5] and Zvi Mowshowitz,[4] with startup funding from Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.[5] Metamed stated that its researchers were drawn from top universities, as well as technology companies such as Google.[6]
Contents
Concept
Vassar founded MetaMed to apply the principles of rationality training, as taught by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his website LessWrong, to medicine, having left Yudkowsky's Singularity Institute to do so:[7]
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Vassar had left to found MetaMed, a personalized-medicine company, with Jaan Tallinn of Skype and Kazaa, $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and a staff that included young rationalists who had cut their teeth arguing on Yudkowsky’s website. The idea behind MetaMed was to apply rationality to medicine — "rationality" here defined as the ability to properly research, weight, and synthesize the flawed medical information that exists in the world. Prices ranged from $25,000 for a literature review to a few hundred thousand for a personalized study. "We can save lots and lots and lots of lives," Vassar said (if mostly moneyed ones at first). "But it’s the signal — it's the 'Hey! Reason works!' — that matters. It's not really about medicine." Our whole society was sick — root, branch, and memeplex — and rationality was the only cure.
Services
MetaMed was intended to provide an alternative to "typical one-size-fits-all healthcare".[8] To this end, company researchers gathered detailed medical information on each client, using this as the basis for the creation of personalized research reports for various conditions (or, in some cases, for the purpose of client performance enhancement).[9] It also assessed the expected value of various tests, and created maps of correlations between possible medical conditions. One aim of the company was to aid doctors with advanced artificial intelligence and data from information experts.[10]
Business model
MetaMed's personalized medical research services were targeted at the market for concierge medicine, with prices ranging from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.[11][12][6] One MetaMed patient, interviewed by NPR, said that personalized medical research was the "only thing that has helped him" after seeing numerous doctors.[11]
References
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