Medpedia Forms Online Medical Encyclopedia

SAN FRANCISCO — The Medpedia Project recently announced that the world's largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine, Medpedia, will launch soon.

Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are volunteering to build this comprehensive medical clearinghouse of health and medicine information, which will officially launch at the end of 2008. A site preview is available here.

Many organizations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical School representatives will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created. Other organizations, such as the University of Michigan Medical School, will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

Medpedia is also receiving content and cooperation from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the U.S Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups that are eager to have that public domain information distributed to the general public and healthcare professionals.

"Medpedia has the potential to become a vital tool for scientists, researchers and educators, as well as for the general public across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on medicine," said Anthony L. Komaroff, professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Health Publications division of Harvard Medical School. "Sharing what we know, we can help each other and help ourselves."

Over the next few years, the plan is to have a growing community of editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures, and the millions of medical facilities around the world.

These pages will provide insight into the latest health and medical discoveries along with photographs, video, sound and images. The site has been designed so that everything on a subject will be simple to access. The main topic pages will be written in language the general public can easily understand, and each topic page will have with it a "technical" page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical and scientific language. Medpedia will improve in real time and will keep up to date with discoveries in health and medicine.

In anticipation of its launch later in 2008, Medpedia is calling for the world's qualified MDs, biomedical research PhDs, and clinicians to go to their Web site to apply to become editors of content. Only licensed medical professionals and organizations in good standing who are screened through a rigorous internal review process will be approved to provide and edit information.

"In recent years, we have witnessed the benefit that a Web site like Wikipedia can have on all knowledge," said James Currier, Medpedia founder and chairman. "With ongoing experimentation and guidance from the medical community, Medpedia could provide a similar benefit to the world in the specialized area of health and medicine."

Source: The Medpedia Project