TechCrunch: MedPedia Is Wikifying the Medical Search Space

“The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.”

“MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.”

“The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.”

From TechCrunch
Read more here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/medpedia-is-wikifying-the-medical-search-space

About: Mitch Kapor

“Mitchell David Kapor (born November 1, 1950) is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is known as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.”

Early Life and Education

“Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended public schools on Long Island in Freeport, New York, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a BA from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. Kapor served as Music Director and Program Director at Yale’s radio station WYBC-FM”

“During the 1970s, Kapor was employed as a radio disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station based in Hartford, Connecticut. It was also in this period that he became interested in Transcendental Meditation, going on to teach the philosophy in Cambridge, Massachusetts (where he also worked as a low-level computer programmer) and Fairfield, Iowa. In 1978, he graduated with a Master’s degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston. Kapor subsequently began a career as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts.”

“In 1980, Kapor left his counseling career to attend the Master’s of Science in Management program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, but did not graduate.”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor