Sermo in the Blogsphere

Pfizer Strikes Deal With Sermo’s Online Doctor Forum

Pharmalot

October 15, 2007

Big pharma finally found social networking. For those who aren’t familiar with Sermo, this is an online forum created two years ago by a Boston doc, whose site encourages other docs to swap insights as they chatter with each other online. Sermo profits by charging investment firms to view postings that could serve as tip-offs to side effects and other market-moving medical trends. In May, Sermo struck a deal with the American Medical Association, which can survey the collective wisdom of the site’s 30,000 members.

Now, Sermo is cutting a deal with Pfizer, and both companies insist they will create guidelines so that any info that is exchanged is on the up-and-up - full disclosure in any and all Pfizer postings. The terms weren’t disclosed, but for Sermo, this is a big step toward full-blown corporate participation. And for Pfizer, this is a new means to directly reach docs, who are increasingly tired of visits by sales reps and who, otherwise, receive most industry messages through CME events and medical journals. If this is proves to be a way to cut such expenses, count on other drugmakers striking deals, too.

“In my mind, I saw advertising and credibility as mutually exclusive to doctors,” Dan Palestrant, Sermo’s founder and chief executive, tells The Financial Times. “Pfizer is going to be working with (the) Sermo community to build guidelines on how the community wants to interact with it. Doctors can now say: ‘This is what we want’.” Ironically, this runs counter to the site’s original idea of giving docs a place to dish without eavesdropping by drugmakers.

“It creates a social discourse around the results, which is very different than a rather cold transmission through other media, where you don’t have that two-way communication,” Mike Berelowitz, a Pfizer sr vp who oversees the drugmaker’s docs, tells the Associated Press. “There will be great care taken to ensure the information we provide is transparent and clear, and done with full disclosure.”

Of course, this opens a Pandora’s box. There’s nothing to say Pfizer or any other drugmaker shouldn’t participate in online forums. But the venue could, conceivably, create myriad scenarios in which, say, off-label info is conveyed or trial results are somehow whispered prematurely or selectively. The FDA, if it pays attention, will likely have its bureaucratic hands full keeping track of countless postings to ensure such agreements don’t devolve into one large, ongoing and inappropriate marketing machine.

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