In the past week I came across two new online community sites, or to use the Web 2.0 jargon, "social networking" sites. One is for doctors and one is for patients.

The first one is sermo for doctors. The about page describes it as this:

Here, physicians aggregate observations from their daily practice and then - rapidly and in large numbers - challenge or corroborate each others opinions, accelerating the emergence of trends and new insights on medications, devices and treatments. You can then apply the collective knowledge to achieve better outcomes for your patients.

This is a very interesting idea. It's open to US-based physicians (which they check, according to the FAQ) and works by doctors asking and answering questions. The answers are voted on, and if you don't like an answer, you can add one. Very interesting.

Then you get to the 'how do we make money' part. This is how they describe it:

Sermo's business model is one of information arbitrage, the opportunity that arises when breaking medical insights intersect with the demand for actionable, market-changing events in healthcare.

Eh? Whoever wrote that needs get an award for Buzzword Compliance. How does it actually happen? It's better explained here. Basically, health care companies, investors, and consultants get a chance to ask the community questions. They pay sermo for the access, and whoever answers these questions may get paid for that.

That in itself is a very interesting business model (I've never seen anything quite like it), so if it works, Sermo could, gasp!, be a Web 2.0 company that actually makes money. We'll see.

Sermo has gotten some good coverage lately: the AMA has partnered with them and the WSJ had a piece about social networking that talked about them too.

On the other side of the coin is patientslikeme. They describe themselves like this:

Our goal is to enable people to share information that can improve the lives of patients diagnosed with life-changing diseases. To make this happen, we've created a platform for collecting and sharing real world, outcome-based patient data (patientslikeme.com) and are establishing data-sharing partnerships with doctors, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, research organizations, and non-profits.

This sounds like Sermo, but focusing on patients. There is one problem I see with this: although each page on patientslikeme clearly states that its content should not be taken as medical advice, I can't help but think that patients will go down the self-diagnosis route and take the content as medical truth, without regard if it applies to them or not. This problem is partly offset by focusing on a few diseases; at the moment these are ALS, Multiple Sclerosis, and Parkinson's disease. Still, this quote jumped at me from FierceHealthIT's award announcement for patientslikeme:

the site allows patients to select for other patients with a similar profile (say, same age, stage of disease, gender), see what treatments that patient has had and what their outcomes were.

Apart from potentially having patients 'suggesting' treatments to doctors, the site sounds like an amazing opportunity for patients and doctors to interact. To put it mildly, a world-wide support network for patients to help them through tough times is an idea whose time has come.

And there you have it. Two great online innovators in the world of medicine.