I wrote how I needed a project like this on Twitter and posted on Facebook asking if anyone was working on it.

It has the power to enable people without formal education to establish expert status in fields where no one without degrees is taken seriously. It also has the power to enable news articles by anyone to establish credibility.

When I write on Medium and elsewhere, I am met with a lot of resistance. People tend to not believe me. They dismiss me saying I’m not qualified, but they are not incentivized to prove me wrong. So what I need to be able to do is back my claims financially, so that people are financially incentivized to challenge and check the veracity. Every time a doubted claim is checked via this process, it could lend credibility to the claim and to its publisher.

Ideally this would be used to fix the information quality problem in medical literature. Too many false and unsupported claims get past peer review. There needs to be more incentive for doctors to publish good research and for errors to be corrected when they occur. The prevalence of errors and reactions I get from editors and authors when I contact them indicate this is lacking. One author told me, “We mislabeled that anatomy on purpose.”

It could also be used to make it so medical literature can be updated more efficiently and everyone can contribute. Textbooks are often a decade behind because only a few people contribute. They typically keep publishing the same content with very few updates because they won’t be abreast of new findings. Also, contributors to textbooks are often older and less open to new ideas or ways of thinking (this is why OB/GYN is decades behind in terms of sexism). Textbooks ideally would work like Wikipedia, where they can be updated by anyone at any time, but rather than having the problematic “reliable source” criterion, having an “evidence-based” criterion. Anyone could contribute and somehow be given credit for their contribution. This would empower everyone to contribute to the improving education rather than just an established few. Right now, for example, my ability to change the content of OB/GYN textbooks that matter hinges on me being able to get through to a select few people.

The evidence-based criterion for all claims would be important in journals and in committee opinions as well. Often you see what resembles a game of telephone where information gets distorted via a citation cascade. Committee opinions especially hold great influence on clinical practice. When false information gets published in them, this is a threat to patient safety.