Wikipedia has been accepted world wide as a source of information by both lay people and experts. Its community driven approach has ensured that the information presented caters to a wide variety of people. An article from 2011 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found that a significant number of experts and doctors consult Wikipedia’s medicine related topics.
Medical information is very dynamic and conclusions and recommendations are turned on their heads based on new findings. Taking this into account it is important to ensure that Evidence Based content is a part of any medicine related Wikipedia article. Such content should be authentic and reliable as people may use the same to make decisions that may end up having life changing consequences.
I was glad to see the formation of Wiki Project Med, a thematic organization first announced at Wikimania in 2012. This is a great way of Wikipedia moving forward in terms of medicine and healthcare. As an administrator since 2006, I will definitely run for board membership in the next election.
The organization will promote the development of medical content on Wikimedia projects. Methods to accomplish this will be via forming collaborations with other like-minded organizations, giving talks / lectures at universities and other organizations, working to develop greater access to the medical literature for Wikipedians, among others.
Mission: To make clear, reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date educational resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences freely available to all people in the language of their choice. [edit]
There was a study published in Nature in 2005 famously reporting that Wikipedia articles on scientific topics contained four errors per article on average while in case of the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, three errors per article were found. Now here is a new minor study:
The small size of the sample does not allow us to generalize the results to Wikipedia as a whole. However, as a pilot primarily focused on methodology, the study offers new insights into the design of a protocol for expert assessment of encyclopedic contents. For our editor community and for the Foundation, which commissioned the study in 2011, it also offers evidence to inform the design of quality assessment mechanisms and quality metrics that may be used on Wikipedia itself.
The results suggest that Wikipedia articles in this sample scored higher altogether in each of the three languages, and fared particularly well in categories of accuracy and references.
John Mack invited me last week to participate in his newest podcast, this time focusing on how pharma could use Wikipedia. As a Wikipedia administrator, I tried to provide useful pieces of advice.
Pharma does not have a stellar record when it comes to editing Wikipedia articles. See, for example, “Simply Irresistible: Abbott Tampering with Wikipedia Entries” and “Web 2.0 Pharma Marketing Tricks for Dummies.” So it’s no surprise that this raises a number of interesting issues that were hotly debated during a recent #hcsmeu Twitter chat. That discussion will be continued in a Pharma Marketing Talk podcast on Tuesday, July 17, 2012. You are invited to listen or call in with your opinions. For more information, go here.
Until then, you can fill in a short survey about this issue on his blog.
Based on the recent open letter sent to the Royal Society about employing a Wikipedian in residence, here is my open letter as a Wikipedia administrator to pharma following the discussion with Michael Spitz on Twitter.
Dear Pharma Companies,
The place of Wikipedia in the dissemination of medical information online is indisputable now. If you want your customers to access information about your products from the quality perspective and in the simplest way, you have to deal with using Wikipedia.
Based on the pretty negative past encounters between pharma employees and Wikipedia editors (pharma employees trying to edit entries about their own products in a quite non-neutral way), we advise you to employ a Wikipedia editor if you want to make sure only evidence-based information is included in entries about your own products. Appointing someone from within your company as a “spokesperson” in Wikipedia who would perform all edits on behalf of the company is an excellent way to update those entries.
Recently, an interesting initiative has been proposed in the Medicine WikiProject (a group of editors dealing with the improvement of medical Wikipedia entries) and we would love to hear what you think about it even if you are not a Wikipedian. An excerpt from the announcement:
I am proposing a Wikipedia:Health Article Review Project (WP:HARP) in which medical residents, during their classes and at their instructor’s behest, use a template to review health-related Wikipedia articles on that article’s talk page. They would be doing this in small groups in about 20 minutes with no prior Wikipedia editing experience and with no support from an experienced Wikipedian.
This project would be advertised in a very popular course curricula distributed throughout the United States. I am presuming that medical residents ought to be able to read a health article and have valuable opinions on how the articles might be improved, and that they could share those opinions on the talk pages of articles with little difficulty if they were guided by a written tutorial at the project page, and that trying this project is unlikely to have a bad result even if unexpected things happen.
We have been witnessing transitions in this area but this is really a huge step in the evolution of human knowledge. Encyclopedia Britannica just announced they would stop printing books and content would only be available online. Moreover, for a week, subscription is free.
Change is good. And this change happened not purely because of the growing importance of Wikipedia, but because of the changing habits and needs of people. Britannica will be able to maintain the highest standards and quality in the digital form just like they did for centuries. Good luck!
For 244 years, the thick volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica have stood on the shelves of homes, libraries, and businesses everywhere, a source of enlightenment as well as comfort to their owners and users around the world.
They’ve always been there. Year after year. Since 1768. Every. Single. Day.
But not forever.
Today we’ve announced that we will discontinue the 32-volume printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica when our current inventory is gone.
For one thing, the encyclopedia will live on—in bigger, more numerous, and more vibrant digital forms. And just as important, we the publishers are poised, in the digital era, to serve knowledge and learning in new ways that go way beyond reference works. In fact, we already do.
The Rorschach test is used for examining the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of patients as their perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed. In 2009, the New York Times had a report about Dr. James Heilman who posted all 10 pictures on the site, along with research about the most popular responses to each. Of course, it led to a heated debate whether this information should be accessed on Wikipedia or not. Here are the details of this scandal.
In the first study, the authors conducted 2 Google searches for Web sites containing Rorschach-related information. The top 88 results were classified by level of threat to test security; 19% posed a direct threat. The authors also found Web sites authored by psychologists that divulged sensitive Rorschach information.
In the second study, 588 comments to online news stories covering the Rorschach-Wikipedia debate were coded as expressing favorable or unfavorable opinions regarding the field of psychology, psychologists, and the Rorschach. Eight percent of comments described unfavorable opinions toward psychology, 15% contained unfavorable opinions toward psychologists, and 35% portrayed unfavorable opinions of the Rorschach.
Common themes and popular misconceptions of the Rorschach contained in these comments are described. Implications and recommendations for practice are discussed. Limitations, including the second study’s narrow sample and self-selection bias, are also detailed.
Last year, I published a list of my predictions for 2011 in the areas of healthcare, innovation and technology. Now after a year, I checked these items and actually many of them proved to be right (year of tablets, Prezi.com skyrocketing, Siri leading the way for voice controlled apps, etc.), but now it’s time to come up with the predictions for 2012. Here are my 12 predictions, please feel free to add yours in the comment section.
1) Digital only class in social media for medical professionals and e-patients. Well, that’s quite an easy prediction, as I will launch the global form of my social media in medicine university course this February.
2) Social media policy everywhere. Now that we have an open access social media guide for and about pharma; it’s time for the FDA to come up with their own detailed instructions; also universities, healthcare institutions and medical practices, everyone must have its own as almost everyone is using social media intensively.
3) Augmented reality in radiology. Augmented reality has been a major issue for some time, but seeing the video below made it clear for me, this is where we are going to head in 2012. Doctors can see through patients.
4) Health-fitness gadgets will rock 2012. Myself, I’ve been using Striiv as a fitness motivation tool which also logs my data and visualizes my exercises making it easier for me to make plans and see how I’m doing. Other examples include Jawbone, but you can find even more if you follow the Quantified Self project.
5) Innovations in screen technologies. The form, material and functions of the screens we know now will change dramatically in 2012. Imagine paper screen, holographic screens or flexible screens on your wrist.
6) Internet TV and the operating room. The news sites are full of Apple TV and Google TV, so it’s obvious really innovative internet TVs will be launched in 2012 which brings up the idea of watching operations live on your TV at home. Just check OR-live.com.
7) Pharma will be using social media more intensively. I’m not saying all the pharma companies will have properly designed and managed social media presence, but many brands will use social media more intensively as we should be over now the so-called learing phase and they are getting braver by time.
8) More and more tablet-specific apps. I know the number of medicine/health-related mobile apps is growing rapidly, but now it’s time to turn to tablet-specific clinical apps that could be used in radiology, clinical trials or just for grand rounds.
9) Tablets in healthcare institutions. Whenever I talked to professors and colleagues about how I use my tablet in medicine and healthcare, in a few weeks, many of them had their own tablets and started using those apps. This is contagious. In 2012, a lot of hospitals, clinics and departments will hand out iPad or Galaxy Tabs to their employees in order to facilitate teamwork and make the work processes more efficient.
10) Wikipedia will have more medical featured articles, less medical errors. We recently published a paper describing how Wikipedia can be used for global public health promotion. After years of focus on creating new medical entries in Wikipedia, now we the editors focus on including proper references into medical articles. It is going to lead to a huge improvement in quality.
11) More health bloggers turn to microblogging due to lack of time. Although I believe my blog is still my major platform online even if Twitter is the fastest channel and Facebook is the most interactive. But I understand those health bloggers who leave their blogs and turn to Posterious, Tumblr or Twitter exclusively. It takes less time to post a message or entry therefore they will use these with a bigger chance.
12) Google+ health pages on the rise. I like Google+ and I think it could be used in medical communication successfully. As Google+ has only been letting companies or institutions have G+ pages, we are going to see a rise in their number soon. Even Ed Bennett who maintains a list of hospital social media accounts will include these as well.
Let’s finish my list with a great presentation about the trends in healthcare for 2012.
