Cost of 5 new textbooks............................................ $750
Cost of First Year Subscription to Up to Date....... $495
Having all of your Medical Information Stored on a Medical Wiki for Free.....PRICELESS
Medical textbooks and subscription based medical websites, such as Up To Date consume an enormous amount of dollars from physicians, nurses and medical students yearly. I recently purchased several textbooks with a average purchase price of $155 per text book and it is not unusual to find some medical textbooks to be priced in the $200- 300 range. Since my medical training started I have noticed a creep in the cost of textbooks which are likely due to more graphics, color photos, and bundling of books with a CD-ROM, but should we expect medical students, nurses, and residents to continue to pay these prices on little to no salary?
For the residents and students who have a library who will pay the cost of a site license for subscription based site, such as Up to Date, they are a great source of information. For users who work in smaller hospitals or clinics the price of $495 for an individual subscription to these services can be prohibitive.
A wiki, on the other hand with 500 GB of storage cost less than $100 a year. This amount of storage would equal 51 million pages in a medical text book. That is a lot of information and could be a potential huge savings for medical professionals.
3 comments:
Great post, a medical textbook wiki would eliminate 75% of physically producing the textbook.
I am curious though, are there other ways (besides as information source) could a physician use a wiki? I am thinking about the practice management aspects. I've recently begun using a wiki at my workplace as a team / project collaboration tool. What about possible external uses of a wiki type tool from physician to patient?
I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks
Bob Hicks
Could be the cost pricelss too for patients o citizens? Open content in medicine could help patients to a better understand of their problems.
I guess medical information is one key but another one is communication - interaction, talking about the medical information and construct new knowledge using Internet as a public good.
Congratulations for the blog!
Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva
http://www.ictconsequences.net
Hello, greetings from the health library sector in the UK.
Congratulations on AskDoctorWiki which is a fantastic resource. As is the case anywhere, we struggle to provide a range of quality resources for our healthcare staff and I am currently researching whether Web 2.0 tools are being used by UK healthcare colleagues to both discover and manage information relevant to their practice.
Can I ask you how long your Wiki has been going, and are you seeing an increase in accesses? I noted with interest your article about searches now containing the word 'wiki'.
Best wishes for the future
Ingrid Evans
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