Medpedia – The New Collaborative Online Encyclopedia of Medicine and Health

George Rebane

James Currier of Ooga Labs just announced the development and launch of a new wiki that promises to be the premier online service for everyone concerned with health, and that should just about cover everyone on the planet.  RR readers were introduced to James some months back (here), and, true to form, he and his team have been busy doing the next great thing that will be delivered on the internet.  In their own words -

The Medpedia Project today (23jul08) announced the formation of the world’s largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a preview site becomes available today at www.medpedia.com.

The Medpedia Project is a collaborative effort to build and support a community of volunteers to create the world’s best and most comprehensive resource about medicine, health, and the body and to make it freely available to the world. The result of this effort will be to transform how both medical professionals and the general public acquire and understand information about health. Contributing to Medpedia gives health professionals the chance to become known around the world for their areas of expertise.

Medpedia is created in association with Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, The University of Michigan Medical School, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and health organizations around the world.

Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year, the thousands of medical procedures being performed 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 constantly improve in real time, keeping up to date with discoveries in health and medicine.

Congratulations to James and the Medpedia team at Ooga Labs.  We – especially those of us starting to notice some creaks and groans here and there - anxiously await the launch of this service in the fall.  RR will be posting updates on progress from time to time – visit the site and stay tuned.

Comments

[Fred Buhler]

Thanks for posting your comments on Medpedia. This is a very useful project. I look forward to Medpedia's launch in the fall.

Fred