Content is King but it's often plagiarised, Mr Gates

How Corporate hospitals in Hyderabad steal intellectual property?

When Microsoft founder Bill Gates titled his path-breaking essay  'Content is King' in 1996 to highlight how content would generate money on the Internet, he did not realize that the literary product would be open for anyone to grab at will.

In the medical setting, content (both text and visual based) are the main means of driving home the message as the jargon-filled industry needs good storytellers to carry out a host of functions.

From brand-building to raising awareness about one's specialisation, both hospitals and independent consultants need to make use of both the written and visual media to the hilt so that they stay a step ahead from their peers and competitors in the digital era.

But it seems the realization for content has now increasingly led to content plagiarism in the health industry.


A case in point

Top corporate hospitals in Hyderabad are not known to be content-savvy when it comes to active blogging activity on their websites.  

So, it was a difficult task for me when I started looking for plagiarized medical content in the websites of corporate hospitals in Hyderabad as there's no content at all.

Except Yashoda (which is actively blogging on health), no other top corporate hospital in Hyderabad is giving importance to content. 

What I found?

My search for plagiarized medical content took me to different websites that I randomly checked. It is not an in-depth finding but here I would try to list out a few examples on how content is lifted 'makhi to makhi' and sometimes, the wings are snapped but rest taken in as it is. (I am not explaining it further)


KIMS Hospital

You can visit this link to have a look at the plagiarised content on Spinal Stenosis, which seems to have been lifted from New York based NYU Langone Health.

Here, is the screenshot for you to get a clear picture.

Continental Hospital


Here, the authorship of the article is attributed to a doctor as mentioned below the title of the article in Continental hospital's website. 

The highlighted portion seems to have been lifted from www.healthline.com. What's shocking is that Continental Hospital is one of the 27 Joint Commission International (JCI) accredited hospitals in India.

In my next article, I would highlight the different elements of content that one needs to focus when it comes to medical articles.