Medpedia is an attempt to apply crowdsourcing concept to medical knowledge, just like Wikipedia. It launched in beta mid-February this year, with some big names backing it (Harvard, Stanford, NHS, AHA, ACP to name a few). The idea is to create a collaborative body of knowledge using physicians and Ph.Ds as gatekeepers.

Anyone can contribute- physicians/Ph.Ds become directors editors (after approval) and others can give suggestions that queue up for editorial review. The site has modest traction but not enough to differentiate it from other wiki-like approaches in healthcare like Ganfyd.org, wikiDoc.org, WikiMD, AskDrWiki and many others (see David Rothman’s extensive list of medical wiki’s here)

There is potential in the wiki-approach, but I’m not holding my breath. Wikipedia may have reached a size and popularity threshold that it remains useful with the community self-policing content effectively, but it was a long an painful journey to that point. Right now the medical wiki space is too fragmented to be impactful.

AskDrWiki is an online repository for medial information modeled after Wikipedia. The project was started in early 2007 by four physicians looking for a quick way to share review articles, notes and images in cardiology. The site is a grassroots effort, and geared towards clinical audience- residents, interns etc.

Wiki’s are a good way to organize collective wisdom in any field, so the concept is valid. Problem with wiki’s are that 90% of content is written (and policed) by 10% of the users. When your potential audience is not a big number (only 100K or so residents enrolled in US every year) and nature of material necessitates careful oversight, all that translates into a very slow progress for content. Their homepage was last edited in Dec 07 and last blogpost was in April 08. The site draws a decent number of unique visitors though..in range of 5,000. Hope they gain momentum in future.

SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them.

SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a ‘computational wiki’ that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit modifications to the database. The system performs bayesian pattern matching and also considers temporal information like the age of onset and disappearance of each finding for each disease under consideration.

According to Dr.Segal, there are about 33,000 data points (disease findings) in the system and the future expansion plans are to include more of metabolism and genetic diseases. Interestingly, the wiki approach for knowledge gathering in healthcare is becoming more common (AskDrWiki, WikiDoc, wikiMD to note a few- more on them later).

Feb 20, 2009 Update: Got an email today announcing that those who contribute information to SimulConsult database will now get paid for their contributions. As they are adding sponsored links in the software, I guess it makes sense to share the wealth. More info here.