Facebook for Physicians? Physician Use of Social Networks - Episode 19
Meredith Abreu Ressi, VP of research

It used to be that when a physician had a patient who wasn’t responding to treatment, or a question about an off-label use of a product, she was usually limited to calling or emailing colleagues, or searching through other traditional information resources for possible answers. 

But with the world wide web, all of that has changed. At first, there were email groups and listservs for physicians. Then there were blogs. And now, the latest trend in the medical community, as with most communities, is online social networking.

Social networking is certainly the hot topic in 2008. For those of you who subscribe to marketing email newsletters, you know that hardly a day goes by without a story about the marketing potential for sites like Facebook or MySpace. But a new kind of social network has been gaining traction among doctors – namely, physician-only communities where doctors can exchange ideas, opinions, and information about treatments with their peers.

The website “Sermo” – which is Latin for “conversation” – was one of the first players in the space of physician-only community, but not for long. WebMD recently joined the game with its Medscape Physician Connect, and there are dozens of other communities popping up for certain specialties, or for the broader medical community of nurses, PAs, and researchers.

As social media has expanded into the medical field, doctors now have the opportunity to exchange medical advice and opinions with tens of thousands of other colleagues instantly as part of a professional online community. And, by the way – both Sermo and Medscape Physician Connect go through great pains to insure that the doctors in the community are certified as being actual credentialed doctors.

One of the examples of the benefits of harnessing collective wisdom online can be seen in a sample thread that Sermo often uses when talking about the benefits of the community. An ER doctor posted on Sermo about a patient who had a small saw that had gone through his thumb. If the surgeon were to move the saw one way, the serrated blade would further damage the finger. To move it the other way would mean extending the wound on one end.  Luckily, one of the doctors in the community had an answer: to slit a drinking straw down the middle and slide it in over the blade, then guide the saw out while protecting the finger from the teeth of the saw.

As seen in this example, the value this type of social network is in the numbers – there is a greater pool of opinions, insights, and answers, which leads to better-informed decisions and has the ability to dramatically improve patient care. 

Plus, for today’s increasingly busy physicians, it has another advantage – namely, replacing the traditional forms of networking that used to take place at conferences and society events. This is critical, as we’ve seen in our recent research that many physicians are beginning to eschew offline conferences in favor of viewing conference proceedings online – and why not? They can view the content from the comfort of their living room. All they were missing were the lunchtime conversations with colleagues – and now that can happen just as easily online.

So just how popular are these networks today? Although they haven’t quite reached Facebook status, the audience of physicians using these networks is growing rapidly. In our recent study of over 1,800 physicians, we saw that over half of physicians had used or were interested in using a physician only online community. And who are the physicians using the networks today? We see that the early adopters of these communities are more likely to be PCPs, and are slightly younger and more likely to be female as compared to the average physician.

Finally, it is important to highlight the benefits of these sites to those outside of the medical community. Take Sermo, for example: Although the site is free to physicians, it makes money through a variety of ways outside of a traditional advertising model. One of the key areas of the business is selling aggregated data from the conversations of the physicians (in anonymous, form) to financial firms, government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and the like. This improved efficiency of information distribution has a number of potential benefits to society at large:  if doctors are discussing a relatively unknown off label use for a product, or a new side effect, or a clinical trial – the agencies and companies that need to know this information are now able to be on the front lines listening to this emerging wisdom. The cycle of reporting these findings from “in the trenches” used to take months, or even years. But now, these findings can be identified and addressed much earlier.

Examples of physician-only communities:

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts, please email podcast@manhattanresearch.com.


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