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According to a 2003 Journal of the American Medical Association review of autopsy studies, doctors misdiagnose 8% to 24% of the time. Cognitive errors, such as latching onto a diagnosis that seems the most likely without considering other possibilities — which experts call “anchoring” — are among many root causes, according to Jerome Groopman, chairman of experimental medicine at Harvard University and author of the book How Doctors Think.

In order to reduce medical related errors,doctors now use various technological tools of web.A British Medical Journal study last year reported that Doctors “Google for diagnosis” (2006;333: 1143-1145) in the article “How good is Google in helping doctors to reach the correct diagnosis?”

Now they can use a web tool named ISABEL,

What is Isabel, it is a Web-based medical technology that generates a list of possible diagnoses based on the patients’ symptoms.

The cost for using this system for a 300 bed hospital is $50,000

The other tools which helps a physician in diagnosis are:

VisualDxHealth is created by doctors and health care professionals. Many sites have information about diseases - We deliver medical pictures and self-care information about diseases so that you understand the disease and can make decisions.
VisualDx contains nearly 10,000 medical photographs culled from 1.2 million accumulated since the 1940s in private archives and colleges, chiefly New York University and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Priced anywhere from $200 to $20,000 annually, depending on the number of users.

This is primarily focused on Dermatological conditions.

The other websites which help in Personalized search for diagnosis are Medgle;

This website claims to have around 6000 symptoms and more than 2000 diagnoses visually created by physicians.

The service is offered for free.

Although these tools are primarily aimed at physicians,yet health conscious consumer “Healthsumer” may use these tools to self-diagnose any of their related medical disease.As we move more onto the web based environment for disease management,some of the physicians are adopting “Medicine 2.0″technologies.

Prominent among them is Dr Jay Parkinson who is using Web 2.0 technologies like:AIM,Gtalk,Yahoo,MSN

Popularity: 34% [?]

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Google launched it’s own version of Wikipedia known as Knol-which stands for Unit of knowledge.

Unlike Wikipedia which is an anonymous user generated content.Knol will feature the name of the author contributing.

According to Google engineer Udi Manber, “is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.”

The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing. Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information.

Also Knol will feature an advertising alongside the content,and the revenues of the ads will be shared among the author and Google.This will be an added incentive for authors.

Also,it will improve the credibility of the content and this can have implications in sharing of health related information. One of the major drawback of wikipedia was that even though the contents were exemplary,yet the author the contents were largely unknown.It could be a winner of Nobel prize or a school kid in his basement.

Transparency of information relating to health is a key factor which will benefit consumers and turn them into effective “healthsumers”

Looks like wikipedia will have a serious contender in near future. But will it take on Wikipedia,we will have to wait and watch.

Knol is currently under beta invitation only.

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Popularity: 35% [?]