Crowdsourcing in Health and Health Research: A Practical Guide

Overview

Crowdsourcing tools, such as challenge contests, are increasingly used to improve public health. Crowdsourcing is the process of having a large group, including experts and non-experts, solve a problem and then share the solution with the public.

This guide provides practical advice on designing, implementing and evaluating crowdsourcing activities for health and health research – with descriptions and examples of contests collected through a challenge contest.

The guide includes:

• descriptions of and methods for challenge contests for health and health research;
• how to organize and evaluate contests;
• practical resources, such as a challenge contest checklist;
• case studies; and,
• a table of commended challenge contests for health submitted through the report’s challenge contest in 2017.

The report was developed by the Social Entrepreneurship to Spur Health (SESH) and the TDR-supported Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI). The authors are Larry Han, Angela Chen, Shufang Wei, Jason J. Ong, Juliet Iwelunmor and Joseph D. Tucker.