An article in the Los Angeles Times alerted me to Medpedia, a “work-in-progress” online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia, but for health information only.  And, unlike Wikipedia, the entries are written and can only be edited by health professionals, who will write their entries with the consumer in mind.   The article quotes Joseph B. Martin, former dean of the medical schools at Harvard University and UC San Francisco, and currently an advisor to Medpedia, who said that  Medpedia is a “mechanism for medical experts and patients and their families to interact”.  Martin thinks there is a need for this type of online interaction and that it is currently lacking in the Internet world.  The website will be officially launched at the end of the year but a sneak preview is available at www.medpedia.com.

On the websites’s home page, Medpedia is defined as “the collaborative project to collect the best information about health, medicine and the body and make it freely available worldwide”.  The main topic pages will be easy for laypeople to understand;  health professionals will discuss topics in more clinical terms on technical pages.  Already on board to help with the project are the Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the University of Michigan Medical School.  Physicians, health organizations, hospitals, and other health professionals are being recruited to contribute to the project as volunteers.   James Currier, the founder and chairman of Medpedia,  says in the LA Times article, that only those “licensed medical professionals and organizations in good standing who have been rigorously screened” will be allowed to provide and edit the health information.   I checked the application to become a Member on the website, and it clearly states that to qualify to edit or contribute to the main content you must have an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field.  And hopefully, they verify the prospective member’s credentials.  If so, this pre-screening should help avoid problems with erroneous and/or unreliable information, a problem which is more likely to occur with Wikipedia, since the entries on that data site are more easily edited by anyone.

Medpedia is certainly a project to watch!  I’ve already added my email to the list of those who want to be notified when it launches, which one can do from the homepage.

Can it can grow from the 1,000 some pages that it currently contains, to enough pages to cover more than 30,000 diseases and conditions, and more than 10,000 prescription drugs, which the article reports is the goal?

Submitted by: Alice McCreary, Reference Librarian
on August 20, 2008 - 4:27 pm

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