AUTHOR: Sarah Cove TITLE: A Networked Physician Community DATE: 1/25/2007 02:48:00 PM ----- BODY:

I read today from the Health Care Blog about an interesting new community forming to deal with a breakdown rising among pharmaceutical drugs and their side-effects. According to the article, some doctors have complained that it takes the FDA and pharmaceutical companies too long to reveal serious drug reactions and have formed their own on-line networked organization to resolve this breakdown. As a means of building trust credibility to their assessments, all the doctors have to give their real names when discussing on the community and are re-validated by the site each time they log in. I am not competent to determine what breakdowns could arise from this sort of community, but I find it an interesting example of how the new Internet capabilities are transforming the way people can network with each other to enrich their assessments and their capacitites become those of the collective. This community is a marginal-cost means of gathering knowledge (assessments of physicians) as decribed in Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks

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