What If Healthcare Was Like Wikipedia?

By KIM BELLARD Last week I wrote about, well, how awful social media has become, so this week it’s nice to write about pretty much the opposite: Wikipedia turned twenty last Friday (January 15).  In person years that’s not even old enough to buy alcohol, but in Internet years that makes it one of the grand old masters, like Google or Amazon.  Wikipedia is one of the most visited Internet destinations, with its 55+ million articles, in 300+ languages, getting some 10b+ views per month.  It is something that, by all rights, shouldn’t exist, much less be successful.  A non-profit, volunteer written/edited, online encyclopedia?  An online resource widely trusted for its objective, generally accurate articles in a world of fake news?  As the joke goes, it’s good that it works in practice because it does not work in theory. That’s sort of the opposite of our healthcare system: it’s good that it works in theory, because it sure doesn’t work in practice. Wikipedia works due to its army of editors (“Wikipedians”); some 127,000 have edited the English edition alone within the past 30 days.  They work in virtual real time; when someone wins an Oscar the update happens almost immediately.  When the U.S. Capitol was stormed two weeks ago, Wikipedia had a page up before the protesters were gone.  Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikipedia Foundation, told The Washington Post: It is remarkable that it exi...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech Wikipedia Source Type: blogs