From Community to Commodity: The Ethics of Pharma-Funded Social Networking Sites for Physicians

In September 2006, a small start-up company in Cambridge, MA called Sermo, Inc., launched a social networking site with an unusual twist: only physicians practicing medicine in the United States would be allowed to participate. Sermo, which means “conversation” in Latin, marketed its website as an online community exclusively for doctors that would allow them to talk openly (and anonymously) about a range of topics, from challenging and unusual medical cases to the relative merits of one treatment versus another. “Sermo enables the private and instant exchange of knowledge among MDs,” the company announced in its first press release. Even better, participation was free and the site carried no advertising.