The Medpedia Project

[Justin]

The Medpedia Project is awesome! <-- Clickable link.

If you are a fan of Wikipedia, you're going to love The Medpedia Project. Wikipedia is great, but I felt very uneasy about reading the medical contributions on that site. The reason behind this is that anyone can add content to a topic and make edits. In my opinion, this becomes a problem when we are talking about medicine--people inevitably post their biases and misinformation.

This is where The Medpedia Project comes in:

What is the Medpedia wiki?

The Medpedia wiki is the collaborative encyclopedia and resource for information about health, medicine and the body. Only physicians and Ph.D.s are allowed to edit the Articles on Medpedia. Non-Editors can suggest changes that must be approved by an Editor before going live on the site.

Intended uses:

• Reference source for both medical professionals and the lay-public covering information about health, medicine and the body
• Forum for an individual or Group to be recognized for expertise
• Clearinghouse of bio-medical journal Articles, data, research, and educational materials
• Forum for debating emerging issues

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.

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.

How is Medpedia a new model?

The goal of The Medpedia Project is to evolve a new model for how the world will access medical knowledge in the future.

The specifics of the model will evolve over time, but Medpedia is founded on several principles that will remain:

Wisdom of the Many - Medpedia is an iterative environment where content is written, edited and constantly re-edited by an ever-larger group of Editors. Hundreds of Editors can read the Articles and monitor changes using the Recent Changes pages. The model, therefore, is that incorrect information will be corrected quickly, and the overall accuracy of Medpedia will always be improving.

Collaborative - Medpedia gives consumers, medical professionals, and organizations/companies their own ways to contribute. Each has a role in the real world and each can be effective in contributing to Medpedia. The tools and permissions for those contributions will evolve over time as the system matures.

Interdisciplinary – Medpedia is able to tap knowledge from all medical and health professionals, starting with physicians and Ph.D. researchers, but safely including anyone with expertise and motivation, including nurses, public health officials, social workers, etc.

Appropriate language - Medpedia provides a structured environment encouraging two types of content to emerge: "Plain English" pages for the lay-person, and "Clinical" pages for medical professionals.

Transparent - All members must have a profile with their real names and must disclose any financial, personal or professional affiliations that may influence their participation on Medpedia. Every change made to the site is attached to a member's profile and every change is visible in the logs of the knowledge base.

Self Service – Medpedia is a platform of free tools anyone can use. Medical professionals can use Medpedia as a knowledge sharing and communications tool, a recruiting tool for research collaborators, a clinical referral network, an article publishing network, and a way to develop their reputation in their areas of expertise. Organizations can use Medpedia as a communications tool for their members and to fulfill their mission. And anyone may use Medpedia set alerts to follow topics of interest, to learn and collect knowledge, to teach and share information and to elevate the best medical information on the web.

Free, Web-Based, Real Time – Due to the nature of the Web, improvements made on the website are immediately available worldwide for zero incremental cost.

[Dave]

Justin,

I just spent an hour on this site and it looks like it can be very beneficial to many different readers. Everything is linked together very well and the navigation is a breeze. The search function works well and I also seen where if a subject/article is missing, you might be able to request to have it added.

This is pretty neat. I use webmd a bunch, but this is much more detail oriented.

Thanks for the info.

[Justin]

Medpedia: A New Authoritative Medical Wiki
Link to Original Article

Medpedia is a medical online wiki launched in beta this past February to provide information about health, medicine and the body. It uses the Wikipedia model, but unlike Wikipedia, the content is written and edited by physicians and PhDs. Anyone can suggest a change, but the changes are reviewed by an editor before anything is made live on the site.

Medpedia suggests that users of this online encyclopedia will “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.”
The development of Medpedia is in association with the Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, as well as other global health organizations. The goal is to be a “repository of up-to-date unbiased medical information, contributed and maintained by health experts and freely available to everyone.”

The site continues to grow and hopes to add additional information about known diseases and conditions, drugs and medical procedures.

Parts of this article were reprinted from Medpedia.

~ Nancy Tannery
Posted in the June 2009 Issue

[muddy]

Thanks!! I discovered this site by accident two days ago and thought uh what is this?

Fantastic!!

[Cindylou]

I missed this the first time around too, ans. Very cool. Thanks for posting this Justin! :thumpup: