The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.
MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.
MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.
The site will feature content about diseases, anatomy, procedures, medications and medical facilities in two ways. The topic front page will be written in easy-to-understand language for the general public, but there will also be a more technical page where medical professionals can discuss more in-depth with a clinical tone. With more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, more than 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures being performed and millions of medical facilities around the world, they have their work cut out for them.
There is obvious competition with established medical resource sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Those sites have done really well, but there’s always room for disruptive technology like this. Look at what Wikipedia did to Britannica, a 250-year old encyclopedia publisher. The advantage MedPedia has is its large range of medical professionals who create content based on their specialties, rather than having several in-house doctors creating content on a range of topics they aren’t formally familiar with.
This system is advantageous both to MedPedia and the medical professionals. MedPedia benefits from their knowledge and experience, and the doctors are able to promote themselves in their specific field of expertise. MedPedia contributors will also be able to form committees and boards in specific areas like “Childhood Obesity” and “Skin Cancer.” Each professional that specializes in that field will be able to join the committee (five of whom will make up the board) and will oversee the content generated and edited in that field.
MedPedia was founded by James Currier, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Currier founded Tickle, a quiz and personal test site in 1999, which sold to Monster in 2004 for about $94 million (though it recently lost a hefty portion of its staff and was said to be shutting down). After taking some time off to spend with his family, he started an incubator called Ooga Labs. He is also known for singing in the Here Comes Another Bubble video, from the group The Richter Scales. Currier is one of three co-founders for the group, which was surrounded by some controversy (they also performed the song live at The Crunchies). He got the idea for MedPedia when he found himself constantly searching for medical information online, like if his three-year old son needed to go to the emergency room for a fever.
The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.
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The use of certified professionals should ensure that it doesn’t suffer from credibility issues as Wikipedia occasionally does.
I’m very excited for the prospect of having professional medical information available to anyone that needs it.
Hopefully this will spark a movement towards open sharing of vital information required by so many.
I’ll be keeping my eye on this site for sure.
This is a great idea. Now sick people can do their homework before their next visit to the doctor.
Great idea, this seems like a great collaboration tool for medical professionals, and a great source of information for the curious, an interesting alternative to sites like WebMD. Great Article!
So now we have another site that could provide us misinformation that people will take as fact. Fantastic… Nice concept, but potentially very dangerous.
@Nicki B. - given that MDs and PHDs are the people who are contributing that content, it shouldn’t be any more dangerous then going to to the doctor. (that can be dangerous too, but there is no better alternative).
spot on thats what we want?
Nowadays more and more people want to date online,so do I.I joined a famous dating site for tall singles,”””” Tallchat.com “”””.There are still some models and professional athletes on it.
http://www.tallchat.com
Either the name MediPedia (extra ‘i’) had issues (TM, domain, etc.), or someone over there needs a slap.
@Thomas Murphy: When you’re a chronic asthmatic and your doctor won’t give you antibiotics without a long fight (untreated chest infections are life-threatening), you’re glad of any little ‘tell-tale sign’ you can drop into the conversation. As I tell my quack, I may well be growing a resistence to them, but hey, if I don’t take them, in about a weeks time I’ll be growing sweet FA ever again.
This idea, or some variation of it, is an idea whose time has come. Health care is “social infrastructure” and, like education, requires a public/private sector collaborative approach.
I hope this guys succeed, we the people need it.
There will likely be more competition in this space in the coming years. Given the information overload out there in specific industries, there’s no way for doctors to keep up with all of it. There’s a distinction between ‘misinformation’ and ‘unknown information’.
I was in a situation a couple years ago where a family membe was being treated by an older physician, and later a younger physician was added to the mix. The younger physician was taken aback that numerous other treatments weren’t attempted. The older physician had dismissed them as ‘too risky’, and in some cases simply wan’t aware of them. In most cases he simply didn’t have all the current information on the treatments. With the newer treatments my family member is doing much better, probably added another 5-10 years to their life, but that was mostly due to a chance encounter with someone who had newer information.
This situation is probably played out around the globe far more than we’d like, and if projects like these can help people in their research, I’m all for it.
I remember a post a few months saying Google was planning something very similar to this (credentialed contributors, etc.).
So how do they verify that the contributors have a degree? Its not really a wiki if not everyone can edit…its just a website.
According to Jimmy Wales, the biggest hurdle is “monitoring and deleting spam.” The most cost-effective solution is to create a big enough community to sustain it at the outset.
As Josh says, if people are not able to update it, it’s just a website.
Having only professionals edit content may alleviate spam, but it will do nothing (quite the opposite) to prevent bickering and infighting, occasionally accompanied by displays of gross incompetence. And when this occurs, people won’t be able to step in and repair stuff the way it’s done on Wikipedia.
Another “problem” is that this site is targeted at consumers with a mere high-school level education. I don’t see how it can be a useful tool for the scientific community even if they introduce a separate category of pages they call “more technical” info.
But since this is all available for free under a GNU license i’m hoping useful content can be smarted up and then backported into Wikipedia where it belongs. Especially tons of PD diagrams and image material that MedPedia seems to have liberated from some institutions.
The fact that they will police the information posted by Md and Phd’s is excellent I look forward to seeing more from medpedia. I agree with Udo that the insider materials will help wikpedia.
I would defiantly use this site as I have problems with my pancreas; I can’t seem to find information with reliable sources. For example I found that some sites say my life expectancies anywhere from 5 years to a normal life span. How can it be so varied? Our health care system needs to have more research completed at home to not only help themselves but help the doctors down the right path.
I hope this works. Another new medical site that also allows people to contribute information is RareShare (http://www.RareShare.org). This one focuses on rare diseases, not general health, and also has a social networking dimension to it…
http://ganfyd.org has been doing something quite similar for a couple of years now.
The licence is carefully thought out, and subtly different.
We have not had any trouble with infighting, unlike the dafter parts of WP.
Great idea, but have you ever read anything written by an MD? Usually not very pretty. Not to mention understandable by the average person.
Nice. Now what I really need is an online expert system that knows all this information and guides me through a diagnostic process. Then I buy the meds on ebay and I won’t have to go to the doctor ever again! Ok that’s not serious but yes an expert system (simple decision tree) would be very insightful.
I require a site where I can look up persistent adverse events/effects sufferred post chemotherapy treatment. As an example*, my wife, for breast cancer, was treated with CMF chemo drugs. Due to severe adverse reactions this treatment was abandoned at the halfway stage. Pre treatment for 61 years she did not have heartburn (reflux) but during and post treatment she had persistent severe refractory reflux that did not respond to drugs and eventually required anti-reflux surgery. Pre surgery it was found that her stomach produced more than double the normal amount of acid [plus other defects]. I cannot find a causal link that the chemo drugs caused the abnormal acid increase. For my medical insurer to accept a claim (iotrogenic injury) of less than 1%, I must provide the research material and this is very hard to find. Living in a small closed community like New Zealand, it is not so easy to obtain assistance from the medical profesionals. Tom Cawood Auckland NZ
* also persistent episodic refractory nausea and formation of cataracts.
Is there really a shortage of expert medical opinion on the Web? We’ve got PubMed and Google Scholar for scholarly journals. WebMD, MayoClinic, and RevolutionHealth all provide varying degrees of expert advice. The list goes on and on. I hope that MedPedia avoids becoming another walled garden of content by and for doctors. Instead, I’d love to see a well-moderated, mash-up of evidence-based medicine and consumer experience. That would be new!
Thanks to the article, well thought out. I searched for a while to find the right answer to my questions!