The Medpedia Project has announced the formation of the Medpedia, which is claimed to be the world's largest collaborative online encyclopedia of medicine. Physicians, medical schools, hospitals, health organisations and public health professionals are now volunteering to collaboratively build the resource. Medpedia is projected as a comprehensive medical clearinghouse for information about health, medicine and the body. The free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008. A preview site is currently available at www.medpedia.com.
Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and various health organisations worldwide are contributing to the project in various ways. Many organisations will contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty have created as part of a medical school-wide effort. Other organisations, such as the University of Michigan Medical School, will encourage members of their faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.
Other health and medical organisations that are supporting Medpedia include the American College of Physicians, the Oxford Health Alliance, the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies and the European Federation of Neurological Associations. These groups are contributing content and promoting participation in Medpedia to their members. Medpedia is also receiving content and cooperation from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Drug Administration and many other government research groups. These organisations are eager to have the public domain information distributed to both the general public and to healthcare professionals.
Over the next few years, the community of editors on Medpedia will create and interlink web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions; more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year; and 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 a language the general public can easily understand. Each topic page will have with it a "Technical" page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical and scientific language.
