Thanks to a growing list of physician networking sites, healthcare professionals have more platforms to choose from that can provide them with new contacts and avenues for collaboration that ultimately serve to improve the care they deliver.

Sermo is the acknowledged leader in the space today, but other sites are also experiencing growth.

“Sermo has been the established leader in this category for a while now, so it’s encouraging to see an evolution of these tools and more entrants into this category,” says Katie McGraw, senior account manager, Healthcare Team for SHIFT Communications. “As the business community has taught us, there is great potential for increased collaboration and crowdsourcing among all sectors, and I think in the coming years we’ll see increased adoption of social tools like these as HCPs begin to realize the ROI of social networks.”

One such newcomer is Cleveland-based Within3, which provides medical associations, health systems and research institutions with "a trusted place” for their members to work, says it CEO Lance Hill. The communities Within3 builds are invitation-only, and are always free for members.

Hill says the company’s business is “growing tremendously.” There has been talk that Within3 is moving toward global expansion. Hill says there is a “strong demand” in this area because the problem of “communication collaboration is only exasperated overseas.”

The benefits of using Within3 are different for each organization, says Hill. For example research institutions can provide more accurate advice about drug developments, hospitals can improve the level of education in rural areas and medical associations can improve how specialists connect with each other through referrals.

“We for the first time radically lower barriers that exist to allow healthcare professionals to interact with each other,” says Hill.

 San Mateo, Calif.-based Doximity, launched in March 2011 by the founders of Epocrates, has already seen promising growth, with nearly 5 percent of U.S. physicians using the site, says its CEO Jeff Tangney.

Tangney cited a recent report from the Annals of Internal Medicine that found, in a single year, the average primary care physician refers patients to 229 specialists working in 117 separate practices.  That is a lot of providers with which to coordinate care, he says, and because of HIPAA care coordination is often cumbersome.

Doximity provides a full directory of every U.S. physician whether he or she is a member or not and phone and fax numbers, he says.  Unlike other social networking sites like Facebook, Doximity takes precautions to verify that physicians are who they say they are.

Doximity also provides a secure SMS feature, which Tangney says has seen an uptick in growth by residency programs, which use it to coordinate care during shift changes.

“With DocText, my colleagues and I can sign out to each other regardless of where we are in the hospital, and right from our iPhones or Androids. This easily saves us 20-30 minutes a day,” said Alireza Zarrabi, MD, a physician based in Baltimore that uses Doximity. 

Doximity provides physicians with a profile that compiles information about them based on participation in journal articles or clinical trials, what insurance a provider accepts, their hospital affiliation and languages spoken, etc. And just like LinkedIn, it allows users to see different degrees of connection, and invite members to join the network.

“In this day and age, it’s a little funny and sad that teenagers sitting in the waiting room have better communication then the doctor they are about to see,” Tangney says.  “We want to bridge that gap that exists today and make life easier for physicians.”