Legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of crowdsourcing among healthcare providers

As the pace of medical discovery widens the knowledge-to-practice gap, technologies that enable peer-to-peer crowdsourcing have become increasingly common. Crowdsourcing has the potential to help medical providers collaborate to solve patient-specific problems in real time. We recently conducted the first trial of a mobile, medical crowdsourcing application among healthcare providers in a university hospital setting. In addition to acknowledging the benefits, our participants also raised concerns regarding the potential negative consequences of this emerging technology. In this commentary, we consider the legal and ethical implications of the major findings identified in our previous trial including compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, patient protections, healthcare provider liability, data collection, data retention, distracted doctoring, and multi-directional anonymous posting. We believe the commentary and recommendations raised here will provide a frame of reference for individual providers, provider groups, and institutions to explore the salient legal and ethical issues before they implement these systems into their workflow.