Thomas Dalton wrote: > 2009/5/23 Fred Bauder <[email protected]>: > >> http://www.mmm-online.com/Docs-look-to-Wikipedia-for-condition-info-Manhattan-Research/article/131038/ >> >> http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2009/05/beyond-wikipedia.html >> > > "Nearly 50% of US physicians going online for professional purposes > are visiting Wikipedia for health and medical information, especially > condition information, according to a Manhattan Research study. >
An interesting finding. There's been calls for literally decades now for greater use of electronic information dissemination in medicine, and one of the big proposals that's been bandied about but never really implemented is some sort of widely available database of conditions, symptoms, treatments, etc. In specific areas there are "best practices" compenedia, but there's no giant database just summarizing everything, even the stuff that isn't worked out yet (physicians still need info on conditions even when they aren't totally well understood yet). As far as I understand, the main stumbling blocks have been that nobody can agree on who should make the database, what the process will be for verifying information, what access policies should be like, who would be responsible if there were errors in it, what constitutes evidence worth including, etc., etc. Seems doctors are voting with their feet and deciding that Wikipedia's attempt at tackling all those is at least better than nothing. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
