Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Dinner with Sermo's CEO, Dr. Daniel Palestrant

Update: For notes on the dinner, see Tech Medicine.

I'll be at an informal dinner tomorrow (Thursday) with Sermo's CEO and founder, Dr. Daniel Palestrant. If anyone has particular questions they'd like me to ask (time permitting), please leave a comment.

Sermo is the largest online community for physicians. I discussed Sermo at my talk on "Health 2.0" at the 5th Annual Healthcare M&A and Corporate Development Conference.

I'm also planning to post observations from the dinner live on Twitter. (Which reminds me -- are there other physicians out there who use Twitter?)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Four questions:

1. There is a generally negative response to the partnership with Pfizer on the Sermo boards. Does he expect that this will continue or die down?

2. What are his international plans for Sermo?

3. Despite the 30,000 registered members of Sermo, average daily login is in the 1,000 - 2,000 mark. Typical survey responses are of the order of 150-250. This suggests that the surveys which are sold are self-selecting and unlikely to be representative of the broader medical population, and limits their usefulness. Any comment?

4. What will Sermo be in 4 years time?

Howard Luks MD said...

Sermo's biz model will be its downfall. They are soliciting comments from physicians...not for knowledge sharing and improvement in medical care---but to initiate their exit strategy by data mining our discussions and selling our data for a significant profit. Big Pharma knows the sales rep model is dead...and expensive. They have been trying to get into the mind of the physician to determine how they are thinking and then determine how they can influence our behavior at the point of care. Sermo is in bed with Pharma and trying to enable pharma to realize their holy grail.

How many of you signed up for Sermo and never logged on again?

Now... Imed Exchange looks interesting. It appears they will not be selling data and unlike Sermo CEO, they believe a "gentle" advertising model is the way to go. I think their site goes live in January. Should be interesting.

Anonymous said...

Dr S,

Are you going to post a wrap up of the event?

Did you get the answers to the questions posted?

Best Wishes