The following news item appeared a few days ago.
Medpedia: A Collaborative Encyclopedia for Health Care
By Jenna WorthamMedicine and health are among the most popular topics for Web surfers, but an Internet entrepreneur, James Currier, says the current offerings are inadequate. He’s developed Medpedia, a free online medical encyclopedia that is going live Tuesday, to address what he views as the sector’s shortcomings.
However, unlike Wookieepedia, Lostpedia and most social encyclopedias, Medpedia has limitations on submissions. Only trained professionals will be able to write and edit pages on the Web site, and all contributors will have individual author pages detailing their qualifications and backgrounds.
“We haven’t yet brought the basic Web 2.0 infrastructure to the medical industry,” Mr. Currier said. “Medicine is one of the least developed areas of the Internet, but could be the most transformed by it.”
A plethora of Web sites like WebMD, MayoClinic.com, Healthline and Revolution Health already exist to help consumers decipher their symptoms, read about their diseases and learn about treatment options. Mr. Currier is aiming to build the most complete database of information from medical professionals and combine it with forums for consumers and patients to share treatment stories, raise questions and directly engage with the physicians editing Medpedia’s content.
So far, the project has garnered some significant support from the medical community. Mr. Currier said Harvard Medical School, the National Health Service in England, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, are among the medical organizations that have donated more than 7,000 pages of content to Medpedia. Some institutions, including the N.H.S., the American Heart Association and the University of Michigan Medical School, will encourage staff and faculty members to contribute to Medpedia.
Before Medpedia, Mr. Currier worked with Harvard professors to found Tickle.com. Tickle provided Web-based self-assessment tests in personality, sex and career topics and was sold to Monster.com in 2004. Mr. Currier, who is currently the chief executive and founder of a San Francisco technology incubator, Ooga Labs, is financing the development of Medpedia himself.
More here:
The site is found here:
The most interesting information about what is being developed is found on an inside page:
About The Medpedia Project
The Medpedia Project is a long-term, worldwide project to evolve a new model for sharing and advancing knowledge about health, medicine and the body among medical professionals and the general public. This model is founded on providing a free online technology platform that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and transparent. Read more about the model.
Users of the platform include physicians, consumers, medical and scientific journals, medical schools, research institutes, medical associations, hospitals, for-profit and non-profit organizations, expert patients, policy makers, students, non-professionals taking care of loved ones, individual medical professionals, scientists, etc.
As Medpedia grows over the next few years, it will become a repository of up-to-date unbiased medical information, contributed and maintained by health experts around the world, and freely available to everyone. The information in this clearinghouse will be easy to discover and navigate, and the technology platform will expand as the community invents more uses for it.
In association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other leading global health organizations, Medpedia will be a commons for the gathering of the information and people critical to health care. Many organizations have united to support The Medpedia Project. See the Record of Merit.
The full page is found here:
Clearly the venture has attracted some pretty useful supporters and the exclusive use of well qualified, non-anonymous, health professionals, combined with the peer review model, should result in a very high quality end-product.
One to book mark I believe!
David.
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