Health IT

Can data mining improve health information on Wikipedia?

DocGraph will share the data it collects with WikiProject Medicine, a collaboration that works to improve health and medical content on Wikipedia.

Given how often it’s changed and how unreliable some of its entries can be, Wikipedia is a notoriously overused source for all kinds of research. Stephen Colbert hilariously demonstrated this way back in 2006 (“The Revolution Will Not Be Verified”).

Yet, a 2014 study from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics indicated that Wikipedia is the top online source of healthcare information for physicians and patients alike.

Seeking to improve the quality and accuracy of health information on Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet, open-data startup DocGraph this month introduced Batea, a browser extension that mines the browsing history of medical students for URLs of their clinical research. DocGraph will share the data it collects with WikiProject Medicine, a collaboration that works to improve health and medical content on Wikipedia.

DocGraph founder, open-source healthcare data evangelist Fred Trotter, himself a writer, recently gave an interview to the Association of Health Care Journalists about Batea (Spanish for “gold pan”) and DocGraph. He explained his plans for the data:

In the beginning it will be basic triage. Medical students will complain about specific content in specific articles, and we will pass those comments along to Wikipedia editors for repair. We are coordinating our efforts with the University of California, San Francisco and other programs that formally encourage medical students to become Wikipedia editors. The goal is to establish a feedback loop where first- and second-year medical students discover problems in medical articles, and fourth-year medical students fix them. Eventually we expect both critiquing and improving Wikipedia to become a core part of medical education not just for doctors, but for nurses, pharmacists and other health care professionals too.

And because DocGraph is an organization of “data journalists,” Trotter envisions his project improving Wikipedia for news gatherers as well. (We sure hope he’s right.) “I think there will probably be some stories about large meta-patterns in the data. I hope websites such as ProPublica and FiveThirtyEight decide to take that challenge up,” Trotter said.

 

Shares0
Shares0