Gilles Frydman

Gilles Frydman is a pioneer of medical online communities. After working on government research programs involving telecommunication technology, he founded the Association of Cancer Online Resources (ACOR) [*] in 1995, after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. ACOR was designed to leverage the communication tools on the Internet to optimize the care received by cancer patients worldwide. A founding member of the Cook’s Branch Initiative (a group formed by the late Dr. Tom Ferguson to promote a model of active patient participation in their care) Gilles has received funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to study the online patient. He has served on a number of communication expert groups at the National Cancer Institute. He currently serves on a number of advocacy and advisory committees in support of patient-centered computing. He consults, with Google and other Internet corporations, about the importance of the networked patients and the central role of the Internet in the long tail of medicine. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Participatory Medicine and founding member and current president of the Society for Participatory Medicine. His current projects are all related to the role of online virtual environments to facilitate and improve healthcare and promote accelerated scientific discoveries. [* To this day ACOR, after serving over 650,000 cancer patients and caregivers, remains the largest online social network for cancer patients, composed of close to 200 separate online support groups for individuals with cancer.]