Medpedia Project, an initiative we wrote about during its private beta launch, has unveiled a public version of its trustworthy, fully transparent technology platform for the worldwide health community. Combining social networking with Web 2.0 health information, Medpedia’s website offers consumers a Wikipedia for health information, a LinkedIn network for health professionals, and a Facebook-like platform where consumers and experts can have a medical dialogue about treatment and conditions.
Medpedia has developed partnerships with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School and other health organizations to help bring content and medical networks to the site. Many of the health institutions are offering the content free of copyright restrictions. Already, 25 medical and government institutions in both the U.S. and the U.K. have signed on to Medpedia to use its professional network.
When comparing the angioplasty information pages on WebMD, Wikipedia, and Medpedia (from a consumers point view), I found Medpedia’s post much easier to understand, both visually and content-wise. The pictures of the procedure and condition were detailed and the description offered two versions of the procedure, the clinical and “plain english” version, which can be helpful when doing extensive research on a condition. The ability to edit or add information to these pages can only be done by physicians and PhD’s in the biomedical and life sciences fields, adding some legitimacy to what the consumer is reading. The user can even see the name of the post’s author and can suggest changes in the post.
What seems particularly innovative is the formation of social networking platforms in Medpedia. While WebMD offers a news platform for professionals, the customized LinkedIn-like application could be valuable in the medical community for finding jobs, speakers for conferences and for referrals. The “Communities of Interest” section, though similar in idea to other online health forums like Trusera or PatientsLikeMe, offers a new twist. Users must submit their real names in profiles. This may be an obstacle to engaging consumers, who remain hesitant to publicly reveal health history or attach their names to certain medical conditions.
Medpedia was founded by James Currier, a well-respected and experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The company is funded and operated by Ooga Labs (also founded by Currier), a technology greenhouse in San Francisco. It doesn’t appear that there has been such an integrated and comprehensive medical platform to date. With the backing of the world’s best medical institutions and the support of the technology space’s most enterprising and respected leaders (Mitch Kapor is on Medpedia’s board of advisors), Medpedia has the potential to be a powerful all-in-one technology platform for the health community. Now all Medpedia has to do is incorporate the power of Twitter into the platform.
Here are a few screen shots:
Very, very sparse. When you compare it with Wikipedia or WebMD, they have so little information. Just checked the info on a condition that I suffer from (very common, not fatal
and they had zero info on it. I found a ton on Wikipedia and WebMD.
Seems like a good idea.
Health is one area where I would not like to get my information from a 16 year old typing away Wikipedia articles for fun.
Is the content published under creative commons?
Anjali Sen
As an athlete who has suffered from multiple stress fractures, I decided to search for that… What did it come up with? 11 Articles ranging from Oseoporosis (admittedly barely related) to Cirrhosis (FTW!) to Erectile Dysfunction (Double-FTW!)
It looks like an empty albeit reskinned wikipedia…
I’d say this has got a long way to go to be meaningful and useful.
Absolutely below expectation! I played around trying out different searches but none retured any useful informtion. Waste of time and space….
Try using correct spelling in your search queries…;)
It may not ‘retured’ useful ‘informtion’, but it will return useful information.
great, i truly hope they are successful!
we are trying to build such a service in europe as well with doctrs.com
check it out if you are a MD
Hey this is James Currier, Founder, trolling late night TechCrunch. No doubt the comprehensiveness of the site has a long way to go! As Medpedia states throughout its press releases and through out the site, Medpedia is not a comprehensive source of information today. Medpedia is a long term project, and what’s new is the process by which the knowledge will be collected and advanced. Today, the community starts with about 1,000 pages (over 7,000 pages have been contributed, but only 1,000 have been put into wiki format and moved over). With over 30,000 conditions, 13,000 drugs, 475,000 medical facilities, 10,000’s of procedures and millions of medical professionals, there is certainly more to do.
Of course, if you find something missing, you can contribute yourself if you know a lot about a subject. Just used the “Suggest Changes” button on the top of each Article page. An Editor will have to approve your changes, but it could be helpful information to everyone, and you will get recognized for your contribution.
And Medpedia is not simply a reskinned Wikipedia. It’s got over 29 major feature additions that are specific to the needs of health information, it’s got a full professional network integrated throughout that’s specifically designed for the medical community, it’s got Communities of Interest for dialogue between consumers and professionals. It’s a whole different animal.
And of course, once we integrate Twitter… THEN you’ll see some rockets blazing!! (just kidding)
Hey James, good to meet you. I had a brief tweet about this with Mitch, and I’ve exchanged several emails with Andrea, your community manager.
First, in anything I say, presume that my flame level is set to zero. I don’t mind a rant when one is called for, but not flames. My commitment – the reason I spend many hours a week studying healthcare transformation after work – is the creation of a new world of what we’re now calling “participatory medicine,” in which patients play an active role in their well-being and in disease management. There’s a lot of info about this on the e-patient blog, http://e-patients.net.
The work we do there is based on the work of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, long-ago editor of the medical sections of the Whole Earth Catalog and long-time friend of the catalog’s Stuart Brand, Howard Rheingold, and Kevin Kelly. I never met Tom – he died in 2006, and I only joined the e-patient group a year ago, after my own near-death experience with kidney cancer. (At diagnosis my median survival time was 24 weeks, and e-patient practices were a hallmark of my adventure, though I never heard the term until it was all over.)
Doc Tom said that e-patients are “Empowered, Equipped, Engaged and Enabled.” He was a visionary who foresaw that the Internet would bring patients together with information and with each other. This was embodied in a brilliant pair of slides he posted in Jan. 1995, when the Web was less than a year old: http://is.gd/jSjt
Thought I never met him, I imagine he’d be intrigued by Medpedia. But his team amassed a lot of evidence that brings into question the assumption that docs should be the sole ones to say what’s reliable. (Note, I didn’t just say docs are useless or patients know everything! Some people hear me talk and make up those screwy impressions. Docs saved my life!)
Meanwhile, in my day job I’ve spend my career watching what innovations get traction, and have particularly been interested in online communities; twenty years ago this month I first became a sysop (moderator) of a CompuServe forum.
Bottom line, this weekend I burned a few kCal thinking out a way your idea could leverage Web 2.0 and avoid some of the pitfalls patients experience constantly. It’s on the e-patient blog: “Medpedia: who gets to say what info is reliable?” http://is.gd/ktNa
I hope your team will give some thought to it. I hope, equally, they’ll read and consider the substantial data assembled into the e-patient white paper, created by Doc Tom and his team of MDs and other observers.
Thanks, and bon chance –
ePatientDave at e-patients dot net
Blogger profile: http://is.gd/kbxR
will be interesting to see how they compete against established health social networks ?
I like the model in general, and agree about the serious shortcomings of medical info from Wikipedia or traditional sites. Several concerns:
1. Even written by Ph.Ds, who really wants medical information published by a private company funded by some Silicon Valley shark? Isn’t that sort of like a Pfizer info packet on a drug? Not very comforting.
2. The site says it’s published under the GFDL (likely because it’s an uncredited, reskinned version of MediaWiki), but the Terms of Service says nothing about GFDL and claims IP rights.
3. Even if it’s less accurate or detailed than Wikipedia, it will eventually rot and die. Unless paid, medical professionals are not going to spend enough of their time on this to make it a viable, organically growing knowledge base. You really just can’t beat the open wiki model in terms of growth and sustainability, even if it’s less accurate.
4. If all we want is an intro to something and it’s ridiculous to get _any_ kind of real medical advice from the Web, who cares if it’s a cited Wikipedia article or this site? I’m still going to see my doctor.
@”A Consumer” — I agree. This site aspires to be the “global” source of health and medical information, which is a noble and very, very ambitious goal, although unrealistic. This is precisely why it will ultimately fail –In this sense, its fate will be similar to Steve Case’s “Revolution Health.”
My experience with Medpedia is illustrative: when it started, I was very enthusiastic about it. As a physician trained in multiple specialties, I offered my expertise and was offered $20 an hour for my contributions in the form of articles. Naturally, I declined the offer –this amount could be very attractive for physicians in undeveloped countries, but not here in the US. Personally, I do not believe that Americans would rely on medical information from other countries.
At the time, I decided to experiment a little and convinced my 16 year old son and 14 yo and 17 yo nephews, one living in Brazil at the time, to sign up as “doctors” on Medpedia and they were soon approved as “contributors.”
Of course, this reminded me of Wikipedia’s early days.
From a business perspective, it is a good idea; Medpedia will probably be acquired by a large institution. As a source of truly reliable health and medical information, it is not.
I absolutely agree. For business entrepreneurs and politicians, health information and health care are commodities that could be manipulated, bought and sold. However, we all know that they are not.
“Medpedia” will share fate with “Revolution Health” and many other sites…
To reply to “A Consumer”’s comments
The TOS does talk about GFDL. It says this about licensing half way down the page:
Medpedia’s License to You: Subject to your compliance with these Terms, Medpedia grants free access to the Content in the wiki section of Medpedia, which is licensed to you and the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) . The Content may be copied, modified and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the Medpedia Editor community as the author of the article. A prominent direct link back to the article satisfies this requirement.
The IP rights you mention from the TOS relate to the basic stuff like trademark and to the content of some partners who want to contribute, but want retain their rights to it. These are large medical organizations who are just opening up. Medpedia is trying to provide them with an on-ramp to participating in the more open world we are used to in Silicon Valley. I applaud them all for starting to take the dive with Medpedia. They get it, and they get where it is going, and we will accommodate the pace they want to move at through this evolution.
Medpedia gives credit to MediaWiki in both the About and the FAQ. If more is needed, we’ll be happy to do more. Remember, only about 1/3 of the Medpedia site is MediaWiki, the rest of it is Ruby on Rails for the professional network, the Communities of Interest, the platform technology, and features that will be coming out in the coming months.
And I certainly hope Medpedia doesn’t rot and die!
Thanks for pointing out the About and FAQ credits to MediaWiki and the GFDL. It’s good to know you’re committed to those aspects, even if I still think the basic concept is flawed.
It’s a great idea – and extremely well executed… Obviously, the content will grow over time…that’s the nature of sites that rely materially on user-experts for content. Well done!!
I am a fourth year medical student and have visited medpedia a few times out of curiosity and wondered why I would go to this site for medical information [which is sketchy at best] and not directly to the Harvard medical school, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins and several other legitimate sites.
But I have to confess: I would recommend Medpedia to my mother-in-law…
This looks like an uplifting new service. After browsing it for a little bit, I can see where it will create new awareness and opportunities for a more open healthcare information system. This is just like something I wrote about recently, touching on webmd – http://zachhell...elp-healthcare/
Vitruvian Man clipart as a logo, welcome to 1994, site renders well in Mosaic 0.9.
I’ve been excited to see the details on this site since I first heard about it. The site looks great, and the social extensions sound intriguing. Also, the site had MORE content and better content partners than than I would expect at an initial launch.
Not sure I understand the goal behind the negative comments here. You guys would prefer to see an announcement for yet another Twitter clone?
The bottom line is that health information is one of the few categories left with a huge Web 1.0 winner (WebMD) and no real up and coming Web 2.0 competitors. Success for these guys would be good for the Web and for the world. I hope they do well.
Again a plug for Twitter.
Leena, how about dishing up some demographic information that supports your suggestion for the site’s need to integrate Twitter.
Twitter is a great place for distributing information that you want picked up by the virtual soapboxers, and by dorks with no lives that follow them, but how does it represent a demographic valuable to this site?
Very interesting concept and information in both the post and comments here.
At a glance, Medpedia looks very similar to wikipedia. However, there is a spot for ads at the bottom of articles and on the left side.
If you want reliable, straight forward health information you should check out http://www.familydoctor.org
very nice
Very cool information.
“Now all Medpedia has to do is incorporate the power of Twitter into the platform. ”
Was this a friggin joke line??
(serious question)
(if yes, then congratulations, you’ve just written the worst fucking sentence in the history of techcrunch)
I hope for their sake that they end up more like http://medhelp.org, http://www.mdjunction.com or http://www.dailystrength.org rather than Trusera….
other than getting TechCrunch to mention it every once in a while there is really nothing going on there…
Great, so the founder of TICKLE is going to help bring us reliable and accurate medical information?! I’m sorry, dude, but really… if you’re going to try and understand health and medicine, don’t start a company you turned around and sold to Monster.com, which then promptly closed it all down and p***ed off millions of users.
I can’t wait to see what you do to the thousands who contribute to this venture. Resell their content to others so you can claim another business success?
TICKLE! lol