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Doximity has carefully built a social network for doctors boasting 220,000 physicians and expects to have half of the country’s doctors as members of its HIPAA-compliant network by this summer. It has supplemented that network with tools such as a secure messaging app, a continuing medical education service from the Cleveland Clinic and a recruiting app Talent Finder, and has used that network to develop a recruiting tool. With the $54 million Series C round it has closed, it’s branching out into other medical professions, such as nurses, and is going after the Canadian market.
The funding round was led by DFJ and funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price Associates Funds and funds and accounts managed by Morgan Stanley Investment Management, according to a company statement.
Although nurses associations have tended to serve as natural networks for nurses, as well as LinkedIn, Doximity’s move could spur other health IT companies to move into other medical professions.
Sermo and QuantiaMD have built physician networks not only to make it easier for physicians to contact each other but also to make it easier for companies to reach them, particularly across payers, pharmaceutical and medical device sectors.
Last year Quantia MD supplemented its social learning platform with a tool that creates different scenarios to demonstrate how physicians can initiate conversations on behavior change in patients with an eye to smoking cessation. The point is to help physicians work through the dilemma of how to have a meaningful conversation with patients when a behavior change is needed, within the relatively short time they have with them. Other variations of this program include colorectal screening and diabetes care.