Medpedia – Combining social media with the healthcare industry, the Medpedia Project was launched in February 2009 in association with Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, and several more medical and government institutions. Medpedia is a place where people can go to not only learn about health issues that are top of mind, but also ask questions about, discuss and follow the latest news on these topics.
The simplest function of Medpedia is its Wikipedia-like articles covering a wide range of health topics. This information is submitted and edited by health professionals; in fact anyone who wants to be a contributor must be a doctor. There is also a professional directory for health professionals – creating a LinkedIn for doctors – and communities, similar to Facebook groups, where consumers can engage in medical dialogue with doctors. The most interesting feature of Medpedia is the Medpedia Alerts page. This page is an aggregator that gathers tweets from reliable sources and categorizes the posts into such topics as cancer, heart disease, food borne illness, drug research, and, yes, the Swine Flu.
