On overview of physician specific social networking sites to include Doximity, Sermo and StudentDoctor.net

1. Farris Timimi, MD
Medical Director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media
September, 2013
Doximity and Sermo
Provider Specific Social Media

2. Agenda
• Provide an overview of physician centered
social media sites

3. Doximity and Sermo
• Think LinkedIn (Doximity) vs Facebook
(Sermo)
• Perhaps a better analogy may be LinkedIn vs
MySpace, circa 2010

4. What is Doximity?
• Doximity is a physician oriented social media site
• Started by Jeff Tangney, founder of Epocrates
• Rapid growth in the last year, now approaching
170,000 physician members (25%)
• One of the ACP survey top 5:
• Epocrates, Medscape, MedCalc, Skyscape, and
Doximity

5. Doximity
• In essence, it serves as a physician version of
LinkedIn
• Once you join, it automatically populates your
profile with graduating medical school
• You personalize your profile with your image,
educational background, employment history
• Once you do so, Doximity links to physicians you
trained with
• Although it requires an active license to join…..

6. Public Facing Profile

7. Five elements of Doximity
• Customizable personal profiles: areas of
expertise, publications
• Directory of all U.S. physicians, searchable by
location, specialty, medical school, and
languages spoken
• Directory of pharmacies, hospitals, labs
• Private phone list for colleagues
• “DocText”: HIPAA-compliant mobile messaging
system allowing docs to exchange encrypted
texts/photos & receive receipt confirmation

8. Five elements of Doximity
• First four features are basic-i.e., a physician
version of social networking site
• Populate a profile within a confined system
• Define a list of other users with whom they
share connection
• View and navigate their list(s) as well as lists
made by others within the network

9. Five elements of Doximity
• In essence, targeting docs who may avoid
Facebook or LinkedIn because they’re not
HIPAA-compliant
• (And the population of docs isn’t large enough to
make it worth either company’s time to develop
compliant versions)

10. DocText
• DocText is more unusual
• Encrypted end to end messaging
• MD to MD communication: E-mail lacks PI
comfort, fax lacks receipt confirmation
• Doximity can send a push notification via phone
or the Web. You enter your pin code, and you go
straight to the message and it’s counted as
viewed, and a time-stamped confirm-receipt
message gets pushed back

11. Interesting Collaborations

12. Revenue?
• Charge recruiters for job listings delivered via the
app (9-10K/15 per month)
• Offer sponsored access to online courses for
CME
• Offer a vanity badge premium model to hospital
systems
• Pharma affinity data for marketing research

13. Why consider joining Doximity?
• Intuitive Rolodex
• Allows users to search for provider by region,
language spoken, area of specialty
• Automatically populates your profile with Pubmed
data
• Allows for online faxing and text-messaging from
unified inbox in a HIPPA compliant fashion
• Reputational management (public facing profile, US
News collaboration)
• Tracking “lost” colleagues

14. DocNews

15. DocNews

16. DocNews

17. DocNews

18. DocNews

19. Doximity
• Advantages:
• Precise referrals
• Secure messaging
• Secure sharing of cell phone numbers and
backlines
• Reputational management
• US News World Report collaboration
• Easy CME

20. Sermo
• Response to Merck’s Vioxx recall
• Early crowdsource signals of adverse drug
reactions

21. Sermo
• May 2007, Sermo announced a partnership with
AMA
• Partnership gave docs ability to access AMA
publications
• In return, AMA received limited access to read
content on Sermo and create postings to which
doctors can respond directly
• Partnership severed in July 2009

22. Sermo
• “As physicians, our first step in the healthcare
debate needs to be clearing the air about who
speaks for us on what topics. Today, I am joining
the increasing waves of physicians who believe
that the AMA no longer speaks for us. As the
founder and CEO of Sermo, this is a considerable
change of heart, given the high hopes that I had
when we first partnered with the AMA over two
years ago. The sad fact is that the AMA
membership has now shrunk to the point where
the organization should no longer claim that it
represents physicians in this country.”

23. Sermo
• The intent: docs use Sermo by logging in and
creating posts that explain difficult clinical
situations that they’re facing
• Then other docs in the Sermo network weigh in
with comments
• The conversation isn’t just limited to specific
patient cases. It also extends to a discussion of
current events, including the latest on medical
devices and pharmaceuticals.

24. Sermo
• As of 2012, Sermo sold to WorldOne, a health
care information company, for 35 million
• No longer has physician leadership

25. Sermo
• Medical industry pays Sermo to find out what the
physician community is saying
• Companies conduct focus groups/surveys to find
out what doctors think about specific products
• Sermo’s customers include eight of the top ten
pharmaceutical companies in the world.

26. Sermo
• Sermo launched prior to the arrival of Twitter
• Sermo allows for anonymous membership
• Can be associated with unproductive and
unprofessional discourse

27. Sermo

28. What about our learners?
• StudentDoctor.Net
• 320,000 registered members
• 11 million posts
• Over 100 volunteer forum moderators
• In the last 90 days, over 60,000 active forum
members

29. Agenda
• Provide an overview of physician centered social
media sites

30. For Further Interaction:
• @FarrisTimimi on Twitter
• timimi.farris@mayo.edu
• http://socialmedia.mayo.clinic.org
• https://www.facebook.com/MayoClinic
• http://pinterest.com/farristimimi