Canadian MDs get their own social network

Canadian doctors now have access to the 21st-century equivalent of the doctors’ lounge with the release last month of a social and professional networking website created by the Canadian Medical Association (CMA).

Modelled in part after existing social networks like the incredibly popular Facebook and Sermo, a social network for American physicians, the new website, named Asklepios for the Greek god of medicine, will give doctors a private place to talk to one another about anything from clinical techniques to their golf swings (except protected information, of course, like identifiable information about patients).

“It helps connect physicians with their colleagues across the country, facilitates the sharing of best practices, and fosters a deeper sense of professional affiliation,” lauded CMA past-president Dr Brian Day in a news release.

After a small but successful four-month pilot test of the site, now available at www.asklepios.ca, the CMA envisions rapid growth in membership among doctors and medical students from across the country.

STATION TO STATION
The idea for Asklepios began last year when Jay Mercer (pictured above using the site), a technologically inclined Ottawa family doctor and the medical director of the web division of CMA subsidiary Practice Solutions, was thinking about a hobby of his: ham radios.

While on a ship to Alaska, struggling with his radio’s reception, Dr Mercer turned to www.eham.net, an online community of amateur radio enthusiasts. In short order, a fellow radio operator from Florida made a call on his behalf and wrote back with detailed, technical instructions in answer to Dr Mercer’s question. His radio humming along smoothly as the boat chugged ahead, Dr Mercer realized something profound: “Doctors are like ships passing in the night,” he thought to himself. The medical community is huge and the answer to almost any imaginable question is surely out there somewhere, but doctors have no way to access one another’s knowledge.

If Dr Mercer could get advice from complete strangers about something as esoteric as the intricacies of broadcasting at sea, why shouldn’t Canada’s doctors -- and, by extension, their patients -- benefit from the same kind of innovative technology? (After all, other recent social networks have targeted far more unlikely audiences: Totspot, for children; A-Space, for CIA and FBI agents; First Wives World, for divorcées, OpenBottles, for oenophiles; or Elftown, for sci-fi fans -- to name just a few.)

Back on dry land, Dr Mercer set about designing what would become Asklepios.

HOW IT WORKS
Asklepios is gated in order to permit only users with CMA member numbers to register. Privacy is crucial: in an open forum, where patients could read doctors’ comments, no one would feel comfortable posting their opinions. But in Asklepios, doctors have already discussed delicate matters amongst themselves, like the best way to give kids their immunization shots, how to use your iPhone in your practice, and advice on electronic medical records, for instance. (Dr Mercer has already changed one element of his clinical practice since Asklepios began operating: he read some interesting advice on Pap smear technique and learned to do the procedure better than he had done it before.)

Unlike Sermo, however, doctors’ comments will not be pseudonymous. “We wanted a highly professional, secure environment where doctors feel comfortable enough to use their names,” says Dr Mercer. “You can connect on a personal level.”

The matter of real names vs pseudonyms is the biggest difference between Asklepios and Sermo, because Dr Mercer is hoping Canadian doctors will choose Asklepios over Sermo which has plans to soon expand internationally. Sermo had initially hoped to enter the Canadian market before the end of the year, but that date has now been pushed back to “early 2009,” says a spokesperson. The CMA has also beaten the American company RelaxDoc.com, another potential competitor, to the punch. “We are planning to open the site to international physicians,” says Erin Mulgrew, the company’s communications director. “We’re just working on the back end of that” to make sure it’s possible to verify that users are really doctors. That process isn’t a problem at the moment in the United States -- “Right now we verify with the DEA [Drug Enforcment Administration],” says Ms Mulgrew -- but the CMA has a leg up on them in Canada: when a user attempts to register for Asklepios, the software checks the name against the CMA’s already-verified database of all Canadian physicians and residents, including doctors who are not CMA members. (Several other similar sites, including Tiromed and New Media Medicine, allow anyone to register.) RelaxDoc.com expects to be up and running in Canada by the end of the year, slightly ahead of Sermo.

Another salient difference between Asklepios and its commercial competitor, Sermo, is the revenue question. Sermo is privately owned and makes money by selling read-only access to the site to pharmaceutical companies, who are itching to hear doctors’ unfiltered opinions about their drugs. “[Asklepios] is a service for doctors,” says Dr Mercer. “It’s built as a private physician community, and there is no plan to monetize it. The CMA would not have any appetite for that type of thing.”

Uptake hasn’t picked up to full speed, in part because the marketing campaign to all CMA members hasn’t begun in earnest yet; the site’s launch last month was only to attendees of the annual meeting. As of September 23, the CMA reported that over 350 physicians had registered for Asklepios, but a spokesperson predicted many more soon to come after the site is marketed to the organization’s entire membership.

THE ASKLEPIOS EXPERIENCE
At the CMA’s annual meeting in Montreal last month, I sat down with Dr Mercer for a tour of the site. The platform ran smoothly and looked slick; the design was simple and clear. Especially for a site that had been only an idea about seven months prior, the product was very attractive and well thought-out. The most important part of the site, the forums in which doctors can write comments back and forth to one another, was very easy to read in textual and design terms. (A slew of new features slated to be released this month weren’t ready when Dr Mercer showed me the site, so I can’t comment on them. Planned additions include blogs, audio, photos and videos.)

It occurred to me that the CMA has done an admirable job of creating a social networking site -- some of which, like Facebook, can be overwhelming to people not well versed in the web -- that even the most technology-averse physicians could grasp without much of a struggle.

Photo: Sam Solomon

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