Social networking for doctors is heating up. This summer, Sermo, which had raised $ 40 million for its online physician community, was acquired by health insights company WorldOne. Last month, Doximity, a LinkedIn-like network for doctors, raised an additional $ 17 million. And on Tuesday, QuantiaMD, a Waltham, Mass.-based company providing an online community for doctors, announced that it had raised $ 12 million from existing funder Fuse Capital.
Founded in 2008, QuantiaMD offers physicians a free online platform for collaborating and consuming content, while charging health plans, large hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies and other kinds of healthcare companies for access to the network. Much like consumer brands can set up pages and use other tools for marketing to consumers on Facebook, health-related companies can create micro communities on QuantiaMD to market to doctors.
With the new funding, the company, which counts more than 160,000 registered physicians among its members, said it plans to build sales and marketing to boost its visibility in new markets.
Mike Coyne, president of QuantiaMD, said reaching physicians – and not others in their offices – is an ongoing problem, but added that his company has built a community that engages members for an average of 45 minutes each week. In addition to communicating with other doctors on the site, physicians can read cases and other content submitted by other doctors and medical experts.
“The way we put content together is designed to be engaging for physicians – it’s short, interactive, delivered by peers and education-oriented or clinically-minded,” he said.
In its effort to provide doctors with an online social networking platform, however, QuantiaMD isn’t alone. In addition to Doximity and Sermo, Ozmosis also gives doctors a secure platform for communicating with peers. Medikly, a company backed by startup accelerator Blueprint Health and the Startup Health Academy, targets pharmaceutical companies and other healthcare marketers with an online platform that helps them engage physicians. And while HealthTap is mostly focused on giving patients a platform for reaching doctors, it does enable doctors to communicate with each other.
