Medpedia Announced, World's Largest Collaborative Online Encyclopedia of Medicine...

Medpedia Announced, World's Largest Collaborative Online Encyclopedia of
Medicine and Health

Medical Community Unites Behind Extraordinary Global Effort
Project Calls for Additional Qualified Editors

SAN FRANCISCO, July 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Medpedia Project today
announced the formation of the world's largest collaborative online
encyclopedia of medicine called Medpedia. Physicians, medical schools,
hospitals, health organizations and public health professionals are now
volunteering to collaboratively build the most comprehensive medical
clearinghouse in the world for information about health, medicine and the
body. This free public site will officially launch at the end of 2008, and a
preview site becomes available today at www.medpedia.com.

Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of
California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan
Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world are
contributing to The Medpedia Project in various ways. Many organizations will
contribute seed content free of copyright restrictions. Harvard Medical
School will publish content to uneditable areas that members of their faculty
have created as part of a medical school wide effort. Others organizations,
such as University of Michigan Medical School will encourage members of their
faculty to edit Medpedia as individuals.

Other health and medical organizations that are supporting Medpedia include
the American College of Physicians (ACP), the Oxford Health Alliance
(OxHA.org), the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies, (FOCIS), and the
European Federation of Neurological Associations (EFNA). These groups are
contributing content and promoting participation in Medpedia to their members.
Medpedia is also receiving content and cooperation from the National
Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal
Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups who are
eager to have that public domain information distributed to both the general
public and to healthcare professionals.

"Medpedia has the potential to become a vital tool for scientists, researchers
and educators, as well as for the general public across the globe, providing
easy access to the latest and best information on medicine," said Dr. Anthony
L. Komaroff, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and
Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Health Publications Division of Harvard Medical
School. "Sharing what we know, we can help each other and help ourselves."

"Making high quality, unbiased medical information freely available to
everyone via a collaborative, open and constantly evolving website has the
potential to dramatically impact both public and individual health," said Dr.
Henry Lowe, Senior Associate Dean for Information Resources and Technology at
Stanford University School of Medicine. "That's why we are supporting
Medpedia."

Over the next few years, the growing community of Editors on Medpedia will
create and interlink Web pages for the more than 30,000 known diseases and
conditions, the more than 10,000 drugs being prescribed each year, the
thousands of medical procedures being performed and the millions of medical
facilities around the world. These pages will provide insight into the latest
health and medical discoveries along with photographs, video, sound, and
images. The site has been designed so that everything on a subject will be
simple to access. The main topic pages will be written in language the
general public can easily understand, and each topic page will have with it a
"Technical" page for professionals to discuss the same topic in more clinical
and scientific language. Medpedia will constantly improve in real time,
keeping up to date with discoveries in health and medicine.

"It's feeling inevitable that all the medical and health information will be
available worldwide at no charge via an open, collaborative platform like
Medpedia," said Dr. Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor
University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School. "Medpedia will
also serve as an important place for medical professionals to get credit and
become known for their specialties."

"Medpedia offers an exciting vehicle to enhance discussions of medical topics
through an interactive format. I believe it will facilitate transfer of
medical knowledge in ways not currently available" said Dr. Joseph Martin,
former Dean to both the Harvard and UCSF Medical Schools. "Becoming an
Editor-Contributor to Medpedia will provide tens of thousands of medical
professionals around the world the opportunity to make a difference in
improving the health of our patients."

In anticipation of its launch later in 2008, today Medpedia is calling for the
world's qualified M.D.s, biomedical research Ph.D.s, and clinicians to go to
www.medpedia.com to apply to become Editors of content. Only licensed medical
professionals and organizations in good standing who are screened through a
rigorous internal review process will be approved to provide and edit
information.

"The enthusiastic support Medpedia is receiving from all over the world tells
us the time is right for this type of resource," adds high-tech legend, Mitch
Kapor. Kapor serves on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, is the
Founding Chair of Mozilla Foundation, the Co-Founder of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, and the Founder of the Lotus Development Corp. "The
Medpedia Project is doing a great job of customizing the Wikimedia technology
platform to the unique requirements of medical and health information while
staying true to the proven methods of open-source, collaborative knowledge
building," he said.

"In recent years, we have witnessed the benefit that a website like Wikipedia
can have on all knowledge," said James Currier, Medpedia Founder and Chairman.
"With ongoing experimentation and guidance from the medical community,
Medpedia could provide a similar benefit to the world in the specialized area
of health and medicine."

Medpedia's Board of Advisers 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 tech-luminary and philanthropist Mitch Kapor.

A group of distinguished individuals have provided valuable advice and
guidance to Medpedia, including Henry Lowe, M.D., Senior Associate Dean for
Information Resources and Technology at Stanford University School of
Medicine; John E. Swartzberg, M.D., Professor at University of Berkeley School
of Public Health and Editor of the UC Berkeley Wellness Newsletter; Anthony L.
Komaroff, M.D., Professor at Harvard Medical School and Editor in Chief of
Harvard Health Publications Division of Harvard Medical School; and Robert
Lash, M.D., Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine, University
of Michigan Medical School and School of Public Health.

Physicians and organizations have begun to contribute content to Medpedia and
the site will be available to the general public at the end of 2008.

About The Medpedia Project and Medpedia.com
The Medpedia Project is a collaborative effort to build and support a
community of volunteers to create the world's best and most comprehensive
resource about medicine, health, and the body and to make it freely available
to the world. The result of this effort will be to transform how both medical
professionals and the general public acquire and understand information about
health. Contributing to Medpedia gives health professionals the chance to
become known around the world for their areas of expertise.

Medpedia is created in association with Harvard Medical School, the Stanford
School of Medicine, The University of Michigan Medical School, the UC Berkeley
School of Public Health, and health organizations around the world.

Medpedia runs on open source Mediawiki software, and like Wikipedia, content
on the Medpedia site will be available for reuse under GNU Free Documentation
License (GFDL). This means that anyone is free to reuse the Medpedia content
for non-commercial reasons as long as there is a link back to Medpedia.com.
In the future, in order to cover operating costs, non-invasive, text-based
advertising will be shown on the Medpedia website through third-party ad
networks such as Google's Ad Sense. A link will be provided to users asking
them to "Flag Inappropriate Ads." Such flagged ads will be reviewed by
Editors and potentially prevented from being shown on Medpedia in the future.

Medpedia.com Inc. is funded and managed by Ooga Labs (www.oogalabs.com) a
technology greenhouse in San Francisco developing several for-profit,
mission-oriented companies to address worldwide needs in health, education,
and activism.

About Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School is one of the world's preeminent institutions in
medical education and research. The student body comprises more than 700 men
and women in the M.D. program, more than 600 students in the Ph.D. program,
and of those many are in the joint M.D.-Ph.D. programs, part of which is
sponsored in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They
are taught by a faculty of more than 9,000, the largest graduate faculty at
Harvard and the largest medical faculty in the world. The research carried out
by Harvard Medical School faculty is at the forefront of basic biomedical
science and clinical research. In the school's distinguished 224-year history,
15 faculty members have been recognized for their work with the Nobel Prize.
Harvard Medical School has, since 1975, published information about health for
the general public, through books, newsletters, magazines, a syndicated weekly
newspaper column, and content licensed to Web sites (www.health.harvard.edu).
Over 300 members of the faculty are engaged in writing and editing health
information for the general public.

The content on Medpedia that is identified as "Created by the The Faculty of
the Harvard Medical School" will not be editable. Harvard Medical School will
not have a role in, nor be responsible for, the content that appears in the
"wiki" section of Medpedia.

About the Stanford University School of Medicine
The Stanford School of Medicine is a premier research-intensive institution
that improves health through collaborative discoveries and innovation in
patient care, education and research. We foster a two-way transfer of
knowledge between research laboratories and patient-care settings with
faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars and students engaging in
interdisciplinary efforts that transfer this knowledge into therapies to treat
and prevent disease. Stanford's current community of scholars includes 16
Nobel laureates, four Pulitzer Prize winners and 24 MacArthur Fellows.
Stanford is particularly noted for its openness to interdisciplinary research,
not only within its schools and departments, but also in its laboratories,
institutes and research centers.

About University of California Berkeley School of Public Health
Since its founding in 1943, the School of Public Health has become one of the
world's preeminent centers dedicated to the promotion and protection of the
health of human populations and is noted for the excellence of its programs in
teaching, research, and service activities. These programs emphasize the
interdependence of biological, behavioral, and environmental factors that
produce health in individuals, families, and communities throughout the world.
The School of Public Health serves as the center of health-related research on
the Berkeley campus. Among the world's leading research universities, Berkeley
is home to seven Nobel Laureates, 29 MacArthur Fellows, 225 elected members of
the National Academies and Institute of Medicine and four Pulitzer Prize
winners.

About the University of Michigan Medical School
Internationally renowned for patient care, research and education, the
University of Michigan Medical School has been a leader in American medicine
for more than a century and a half, producing generations of outstanding
physicians and medical scientists. It was the first medical school in the
United States to own and operate its own hospital--a tradition of close
integration with clinical care that continues today as the Medical School
forms an integral part of the university's Health System. The U-M Health
System also includes three nationally ranked hospitals, 40 outpatient health
centers, and a number of specialized programs for treatment and research in
cancer, cardiovascular disease, geriatrics, depression, diabetes, vision,
women's health, organ transplant and other specialties. The Medical School's
research community is one of the nation's largest, winning more than $342.5
million in funding, and generating more than 120 newly disclosed inventions
each year.

Medpedia Disclaimer
The content on or accessible through Medpedia.com is for informational
purposes only. Medpedia is not a substitute for professional advice or expert
medical services from a qualified healthcare provider. Information on Medpedia
is for educational and informational purposes only; it is not intended as and
does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are a patient, see
your doctor for advice and diagnosis. If you are affected by any potential
health or medical emergency, call your local emergency service immediately.

Organizations associated with Medpedia are not responsible for the content
that appears in the editable pages of Medpedia, which can contain content
submitted by other health professionals or other persons, including those who
may not be affiliated with these organizations.

SOURCE The Medpedia Project

Laura Cinnamon of Lipman Hearne, Inc., +1-202-457-8100,
lcinnamon@lipmanhearne.com, for The Medpedia Project