Sermo in the Blogsphere

Sermo Starting to Kick-Butt and Take Names

The Health Care Blog

April 16, 2007

Sermo, the physician community site, seems to really be on a roll. I can now tell you what CEO Daniel Palestrant told me a few weeks back.

1. They've got 10,000 physicians registered--and there's a lot of use on the site. Consider that there are only 600K active physicians in the US, and the average physician survey done by market research tends to have fewer than 100 doctors in it.


2. They're taking aim squarely at Gerson Lehman and the other physician introduction "dating-agencies" which service Wall Street. Essentially they're allowing their customers to get a view about what physicians are seeing and discussing, and the physicians seem to like itÑand don't seem to want much if any money for their time.

For investors, such information could be extremely valuable, since it suggests-before the information is disclosed by Pfizer-that Lipitor could well be losing market share. The professional investors can do the arithmetic to figure out a worst-case scenario based on Lipitor losing one-third of its existing users, and how many hundreds of millions of dollars a year that is worth. Perhaps they want to sell Pfizer stock short in anticipation of the Lipitor side effect becoming a market reality in six months or a year.

Part of the reason the physician users like it, is that the UI and web tools they've put together are really neat. I would love it if Six Apart could knock those off and then my blog users could see things like where they'd commented, who'd commented on their comments. what the most active posts are, etc, etc. Perhaps Sermo should go into the blog hosting business?

Just kidding-I think they have bigger fish to fry.

What really surprises me is that although there are patient social networking sites popping up daily, I see no one else seriously going after physicians. Given how valuable physicians are, and the huge amounts dropped on researching into what they think by pharma, investors, health plans, et al, I cannot imagine why there aren't more competitors.

View blog