My Home About Me

by H.S. Ayoub, DMD
BioHealth Investor.com



As an investor, how powerful would you feel if thousands of physicians and medical practitioners were ready to answer any question you had?

That is what Sermo.com promises with AlphaMD, a new service where clients have access to the collective intellect of 12,000 medical practitioners, and that number is growing by more than 800 new members a week!

Sermo.com is the web's largest community of medical professionals; what CEO Dr. Daniel Palestrant calls, "peer review on steroids."

AlphaMD serves as a sort of "lens" through which clients can view Sermo.com's community, creating a wide-angled picture of the latest medical opinions from the frontlines.

AlphaMD also allows a client to interact with community members. Clients, which currently include Large hedge funds, investment research firms, and the biopharmaceutical industry, can post questions on Sermo.com, and within hours hundreds of physicians would reply. The idea is to utilize the collective opinion of a large group rather than that of a few industry analysts.

According to Dr.Palestrant, a client posted a question on Sermo.com asking whether Provenge, Dendreon's (DNDN) cancer vaccine, would be given a favorable review by the FDA panel. 89% of doctors responded with either a "definite" or a "possible" positive recommendation.

As many on Wall Street now know, Dendreon recieved a favorable recommendation by the panel and the stock more than quadrupled on the news. It is that kind of real-time feedback that investors hunger for, and AlphaMD promises to deliver it.

Unfortunately, I cannot become a member of Sermo.com's community of medical practitioners due to the extra "D" in front of my "MD". Membership is limited to professionals accredited as MD's or DO's.

However, I did have the pleasure of reviewing Sermo.com and AlphaMD through a press account. I found the community very easy to navigate, and a simple, clutter-free design was easy on the eyes. AlphaMD was practical; as the platform allows clients to keep a watch list of certain keywords of interest, such as a company's name, a specific drug or disease. It also lists the most recent messages, and the top chat tags at Sermo.com; important tools for any investor prowling for the latest information.

But can clients really trust these community doctors? It is the web after all!

Dr.Palestrant assured me that to become members doctors must provide credentials and information which Sermo.com can use to monitor who each member is. So Sermo.com is not your typical chat forum where members can hide behind obscure aliases.

Also, and I found this surprising, the most active group of members are above the age of 35. In fact, the older the members tend to be, the more active they are! This surprising statistic tends to add credibility to Sermo.com's forums, a contrast to the other teen-driven, profanity-laden discussion boards littering the web.

AlphaMD is currently not available to small individual investors as cost is high; high enough for Sermo.com to not disclose it publicly. But Dr.Palestrant did mention that services catering to individual investors will "almost certainly" be available in the future.

Let's hope that "future" is not too distant.



Source: BioHealth Investor.com

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