Founded in 2005, SERMO has grown from a handful of physicians who wanted a virtual “doctor’s lounge” to over 343,000 members, making it the top social network for physicians in the US and growing in the rest of the world. In Latin, Sermo means “conversation” or “discussion” and it has become the place for doctors to congregate to share ideas.” The goal of SERMO is to bring healthcare, globally together,” said Jamie Fernandes, VP of Product. “But it’s more than just Facebook for doctors. We want it to be a common place for them to share ideas on things like the politics influencing medicine, to cases they haven’t seen before, to collaborating with others with different specialties.”
As SERMO made an effort to gain an international audience, they knew it was important to develop an app that made adoption easy. “When we initially started the discussion for our international launch strategy, we wanted to be ‘mobile first,’” said Fernandes. “An app already existed, but it was outdated. We wanted to move into a social network paradigm that included features like an activity feed. The new app would be central to the international launch because of two reasons: one, in certain countries, physicians only had access to the internet via mobile devices; and two, just the higher proliferation of mobile devices overall.”