Medscape Physician Connect June 24, 2008
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Physician Connect is a new community area on Medscape that allows physicians to securely engage online with other physicians in discussions on clinical as well as non-clinical topics that are relevant to the practice of medicine. The site was launched early this year, and is claimed to have gathered 20,000 registrants since (according to their Q1 FY08 Earnings Call Transcript). I guess that is enough for them to call themselves “…the largest online community of physicians and healthcare professionals today”. Why bother with modesty or proof.
The business idea is to mine the community generated data and monetize it by letting sponsors directly participate and gain real-time insights into physician attitudes and perceptions. They provide online CME (free), journal articles and news/meetings/conference coverage. The standard WebMD fare of Medscape Drug Reference, expert columns and interviews are included too.
PatientsLikeMe June 10, 2008
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PatientsLikeMe is a social networking site that enables patients to share information around disease conditions. It was started in 2004 by concerned family members of an individual with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Users can register for free and interact around eleven conditions: ALS/Motor Neuron Disease, Anxiety, Bipolar, Depression, HIV/AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis, OCD, Parkinson’s disease, PLS, PMA and PTSD. For a site focused on limited number of disease conditions, they get some serious traction:
PatientsLikeMe enables affected individuals to find others with similar condition, share experiences, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Users can also track their progress and keep up with relevant research. The knowledge of first hand information about a disease experience, treatment effectiveness or side effect is very powerful for managing these complex multi-system diseases.
Needless to say, the rich data generated by such a focused and engaged community is invaluable for research. So no surprise that one of the revenue models behind PatientsLikeMe is the sale of anonymized data from and permission-based access to their user community.
Sermo June 3, 2008
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Sermo is a free online community restricted to verified US physicians. It was founded in 2006 by Daniel Palestrant. Although its not the only one in this niche, Sermo has managed to get plenty of press and continuous funding ($3m in 2006, followed by $9.5m and $26.7 in 2007).
So what is special about Sermo? For one, it has been forming all the right partnerships. Take its alliance with the country’s largest physician organization (AMA), collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the agreement with main regulatory authority FDA. Second, it’s been successful in getting traction from a very fickle and tech-resistant group of prefessionals- physicians. Their compete.com report is pretty impressive:
The site claims 65,000 users and generates revenue by charging outsiders for access to the community. The data generated by physician interactions around medical events, treatments, observations, opinions provide valuable insights to commercial organizations. The ‘information arbitrage’ model, as Sermo calls it, is shown below:
Sermo is not alone in trying to aggregate and monetize the lucrative US physician community. Docsboard, SocialMD, DoctorNetworking are others in the game. There is competition in adjacent spaces too: NurseGroups, NurseLinkup are focusing on the registered nursing professionals, StudentDoctor.net focuses on medical students. Even finer niches like women in medicine are online (MomMD).