uber-asd for MDs only?

Could this really be a good idea? Physicians going online to get
second opinions and find solutions for their more difficult cases? If
it works for the patients, like at this group, can it work for
doctors, too? Or just for the investor/sponsors????

Morris
*************************************************
Doctors to swap ideas via Web site
AMA, Wall Street firms partner in online service

The Associated Press
Updated: 8:35 a.m. PT May 30, 2007

BOSTON - The American Medical Association is working with a startup
company that encourages doctors to swap ideas online and charges
investment firms to view postings that could serve as tip-offs to drug
side effects and other market-moving medical trends.

The AMA on Wednesday plans to announce a partnership with a company
called Sermo Inc., which seeks to use the Web to tap into the
collective wisdom of the service's growing network of 15,000 U.S.
doctors.

Some doctors are skeptical the nine-month-old service can advance
medical safety, and a pharmaceutical industry group worries the
service could spread as much rumor as fact.

But the 160-year-old AMA hopes its collaboration with Cambridge, Mass.-
based Sermo will open a new line of communication, allowing members to
quickly share everything from advice about treating an individual
patient's unique symptoms to opinions on whether regulators should
approve an experimental drug.

The two-year deal allows the Chicago-based AMA to survey its members
on hot topics, just as Sermo's Wall Street subscribers solicit
doctors' opinions to help guide trading decisions on drug company and
medical device stocks.

"From AMA's perspective, this gives us access to the largest online
physician community, and lets us connect our members with that," said
Dr. Cecil B. Wilson, chairman of the board of AMA, which has 250,000
members.

Physician community
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. doctors based outside hospitals practice
alone or in groups of five or fewer physicians, AMA says. That
isolation makes it hard for many doctors to keep up on breaking
medical developments, Wilson said, because they need to rely on
journals, conventions, continuing education and word of mouth.

Dr. Michael Tomblyn, a radiation oncologist at the University of
Minnesota, said he logs on to Sermo several times a day between
patient appointments and is now one of the service's most frequent
posters.

"Someone can say, 'I've got this one complicated case. Here's the
workup. Have you ever seen this before, and how would you manage it?"'
Tomblyn said. "Within three hours, you can have a dozen responses from
physicians in three or four different specialties. With all the
burdens of practicing medicine today, there is not a lot of time and
effort put into creating a physican-to-physician community. That is
really something Sermo has built."

Sermo - the name means "conversation" in Latin - says 15,000
physicians have signed up since its launch last September, dwarfing
existing online physician forums that rely on advertising for support,
unlike Sermo's subscriber-based, ad-free model. The privately held
firm says it has raised $11.5 million in venture capital.

For now, Sermo isn't letting drug and device companies join a list of
subscribers that Sermo says numbers "10 to 20" financial services
firms, including managers of hedge funds and mutual funds. Subscribers
pay $100,000 to $500,000 a year.

U.S. doctors sign up free of charge by sharing personal information
including medical license numbers. Sermo verifies the information
against records databases to try to prevent postings by non-doctors
with an ax to grind, such as a pharmaceutical firm representative
hyping a drug. Doctors post anonymously, without having to disclose
ties to drug or medical device makers.

Other doctors rank postings based on whether the information appears
credible - a "wisdom of the crowd" approach that Sermo says assigns
low rankings to spurious claims that should be read with skepticism.
Doctors can challenge or corroborate others' postings.

As enticements, Sermo sometimes sends $20 checks to physicians who
regularly make highly ranked postings.

"What we found early on is that the money was the smallest motivator,"
said Sermo's chief executive, Dr. Daniel Palestrant, a former surgery
resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "The
biggest is the sense of community, and the ability to share ideas with
one another."

Dr. William Maisel, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess who
recently chaired a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on
heart stents, said he's skeptical the Web site will supplement
government registries and industry systems to track unexpected drug
reactions and device malfunctions.

"Incomplete, cryptic descriptions of drug adverse events or device
malfunctions are not particularly useful in determining whether a true
problem exists," Maisel said. "Without knowing the event rate - not
just what went wrong, but out of how many patients exposed - it is
difficult to separate a true problem from an expected event."

Alan Goldhammer, of the industry group Pharmaceutical Research and
Manufacturers of America, worries that many doctors will essentially
be spreading rumors about drug side effects and could "short-circuit"
clinical trials and reviews by drug companies and the FDA.

Marc Harris, director of U.S. equity research for RBC Capital Markets,
said his firm is pleased with the information his medical stock
specialists have picked up so far via Sermo.

After a study in March raised questions about the effectiveness of
drug-coated heart stents, RBC polled cardiologists to see whether they
expected fewer surgeries to implant the devices.

"Within the first three or four days, we got responses from 100
doctors, and 65 percent of them expected a reduction," Harris said.

"The jury's still out over how valuable this data can be," he added.
"But if you think of it as part of the fabric of information
investment managers could use to confirm their holdings, or for a
mutual fund, that is valuable information."

.

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