This is the transcript from the recent Health 2.0 Communities podcast–original post here.
Matthew Holt: Welcome to another podcast here at the Health Care Blog. This is Matthew Holt, and with me today are two more leaders of what we’re starting to call the Health 2.0 Movement. They are Daniel Palestrand, founder and CEO of Sermo, a community-focused site that focuses on physicians, and Unity Stoakes, President & COO of Organized Wisdom, which is a community site focused on patients and consumers. Good afternoon, both of you.
Daniel Palestrand: Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
Unity Stoakes: Likewise, Matthew. Thank you for setting this up.
Matthew: Let’s start off by getting right into it. I suspect that a lot of people reading the blog haven’t heard of Sermo or Organized Wisdom, and you guys are on different sides of the same coin. This is all to do with the open health care issue, and the idea of getting many more voices online. Daniel, why don’t you start off? Tell us a bit about the core idea behind Sermo, what it does, and what kind of activities are going on on your side?
Daniel: Sure. Up until about fifteen months ago, I was a surgical resident at one of the hospitals here in Boston. I had done some startups in ’98 and ’99, but really had no near-term plans to go back to the business world.
I started seeing a trend more and more with my colleagues, where we would be talking about cases or recent news in the mainstream press — perhaps a new revelation about a new approach to treating a disease, or a problem with a drug or device, or a new resistant form of bacteria. What we were remarking on was that we had inklings of this — it had come up in conversation weeks or months ago — that there was an idea there. We realized that this wasn’t a fluke event. So often in the trenches of medicine, at the bedside, in grand rounds, physicians were talking about these phenomena long before it appeared in the conventional press. That set me about thinking: what would you have to do to capture these clinical insights and make them useful?
My starting point was coming up with a business model. I had done other startups that involved physicians and health care IT, and I knew that trying to get people to part with money is particularly difficult in health care IT. So from the start, we had a model where we would not have physicians paying for anything. We would look to get the parties who find value in the information to pay — to underwrite the business model.
My second thought was, assuming we could get physicians to make these insights, how would we distinguish the signal from the noise? I had had enough experience with my early work with the CDC and Device Registry to know that getting the initial observations isn’t the challenge. The real challenge is separating the signal from the noise in the background. What I wondered was, could you create a model whereby the valuable information would be determined by the users themselves — in other words, the people on the front line.
That was really when Sermo was born. In our model, we have a system where any licensed and credentialed physician can submit an observation, but what really distinguishes the value of that observation is the degree of corroboration that it gets from other physicians. It started out with a very simple, basic idea. We were thrilled to see that it was a very patentable and fundable idea, and has now turned out to be extremely scalable. We are seeing an incredible torrent of information coming out of our system.
We’re now a thriving young startup company, part of what we’ve realized is a much broader trend, variously called social media, Web 2.0, or prediction markets. We’re very excited to see other companies, like Organized Wisdom, tapping into the same trends.
Unity: I’m actually the president and co-founder of Organized Wisdom. We’re a health-focused social networking site. The easy way to think about what we’re doing is that we’re a mash-up between WebMD and Myspace.com. We’re really focused on integrating expert content with user-generated content, and eventually flaring in industry content and research from health organizations as well.
We got started… actually, my partner Steven Krein and I have been in the online space for the last twelve years. We took a company called Promotions.com public in the late ’90s. It was an online marketing company that was later acquired by iVillage. So we spent many years seeing a lot of these community trends taking shape in other industries, but we didn’t see a lot of progress being made with online health. At the same time, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen eight out of ten people going online to search for health information. We’ve also seen a lot of research indicating that people are turning to their friends and family to get health information. So we got the idea to combine the two and really try to create a community for consumers, patient experts and leaders of health organizations to come together and share their wisdom and knowledge in an organized, structured way… to build a very useful, helpful knowledge base covering thousands of health topics, conditions and diseases, so that any consumer needing health information could easily come in and find the information that they need.
So there are three treatments for prostate cancer. Medicare pays physicians a whole lot more for one (new snazzy non-invasive one that patients prefer too) than the other two. So they rush off to get the necessary equipment and staff-up to perform the new procedure. Then they start doing that rather more than they others. And 
