Institute For The Future

Should the doctor be ordering MedPedia yet?

MedPedia, which I wrote about last fall, has gone public. Part Wikipedia for health information, part LinkedIn for health professionals, it remains the Health 2.0 darling of TechCrunch (TC). In a recent post, Medpedia’s Health Platform Could Be Just What The Doctor Ordered," TC writer Leena Rao lauded MedPedia as "the trustworthy, fully transparent technology platform for the worldwide health community." She compared the entry on angioplasty to similar pages on WebMD and Wikipedia, and found,

 

Medpedia’s post much easier to understand, both visually and content-wise. The pictures of the procedure and condition were detailed and the description offered two versions of the procedure, the clinical and “plain english” version, which can be helpful when doing extensive research on a condition.

 

Unfortunately, I did not have the same experience when I tried to look at MedPedia's entry on breast cancer.  Why?  Because MedPedia doesn't have an article on breast cancer! 

After several frustrating search attempts, I finally checked the index of all articles and realized that a breast cancer entry has yet to be created. I quickly skimmed the articles list and noticed that colon, hypopharyngeal, prostate, thyroid, and testicular cancers all have entries, but breast, lung, and pancreatic cancers do not. This distribution of articles surprised me, given the prevalence of breast cancer and lung cancer in the United States (most common cancer in women (25%), and second most common cancer among both men (15%) and women (14%), respectively, according to Wikipedia). Wikipedia's entry on breast cancer is thorough, with links to more detailed articles on specific related topics, such as screening, staging, and treatment. The WebMD Breast Cancer Center has an extensive collection of information (perhaps too much information?) and resources on all aspects of the disease.

MedPedia includes three taglines on its front page: Collaborative; Interdisciplinary; and Always evolving, never complete. While I agree that the nature of any wiki-type collection of information generally fits the third tag, I am concerned that MedPedia's excellence is being touted before the site has even compiled a representative (never mind thorough, and certainly never expect complete) collection of articles about major health concerns.

I think MedPedia holds tremendous potential to offer the best of both worlds--the easy-to-understand entries found on Wikipedia and the trustworthy information written by health professionals on WebMD--but it is not there yet, if for no other reason than lack of breadth. Perhaps I am less glowing about it than TC's Rao is because I am less enamored (though certainly impressed) with MedPedia's founder, James Currier, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and one of its backers, Mitch Kapor (of Lotus 1-2-3 fame).