Professional social network - Sermo

A colleague sent me a link to a semi new social network called Sermo. It is an online community of physicians that discuss recent advances, medical drugs, and other aspects of patient care.

Although you must be a physician to access the site for free (your medical licence number is asked for and verified) - non physicians are able to join (for a fee) and observe and track physician prescribing behavior for example. Business model - buyers include health care organizations, financial companies (hedge funds, etc.), and governmental/academic organizations.

The American Medical Association signed a multi-year deal with Sermo, and although Sermo (most likely) does not have a large client base, they are expected to hit their 2007 revenue goals of 4-6 million dollars.

Approximately 2/3's of their member list (which consists of approximately 20,000 physicians) is composed of US physicians, but the UK has been showing some increasing numbers. There is a lot more potential for growth despite the fact that the percent of global Internet users who access the site has grown 150% in the last 3months (easy to do when you are starting off very small, however).

I hope for great things and I hope that the inclusion of Pfizer physicians do not cause problems for doctors (who may be swayed to prescribe certain drugs over others) or for the industry (which always seems to have its name on a rap sheet). However, it was the online Sermo community of physicians that wanted industry physicians to join and share information on the network -- so hopefully everything will go well.

My only question - where is the patient version of this?