[LINK] Australian online physician community joins European Alliance

[Sylvano]

<quote>
Australia’s leading online physician community joins European Alliance
Thursday 30 June, 2011 – Oxford

International growth of Networks in Health creates broad geographical
physician engagement opportunity

Networks in Health, whose online communities already comprise over 600,000
physicians across Europe, has announced that the leading independent
network of medical professionals in Australia has joined the Alliance.

e-healthspace.com.au, which launched less than 12 months ago, has an
active membership of over 9,000 physicians - approximately 45 per cent of
the entire general practitioner population. Usage of the community is
high, and some 40% of members interact with the extensive clinical
content, discussion forums, education modules and sponsored resources on a
regular basis.

The Australian community, which initially sought to attract GPs, is now
rapidly expanding its membership among secondary care physicians from key
specialty groups, including oncology and cardiology.

Networks in Health was formed by Doctors.net.uk, the UK's largest online
network of medical professionals, in May 2011. It is a unique
international alliance of online physician communities which, having
established strong affiliations across Europe, is looking to grow by
recruiting further communities in key international healthcare markets.

Networks in Health’s current partner communities include Egora and La
Revue du Praticien in France, Medcenter in Spain and Portugal, coliquio in
Germany, Austria and Switzerland and MedUniverse in Sweden. Further
announcements regarding new partners joining the Alliance are likely.

Gareth Thomas, development director of Networks in Health, said: “The
launch of this ‘network of communities’ is answering a real need,
especially for organisations wishing to research and engage with
physicians internationally. We’ve been approached by many global
pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organisations to talk about the
unprecedented access to physicians now offered.

Kamalesh Goswami, Director of Online Solutions of e-healthspace.com.au,
said: “We are now able to offer clients a single access point to a huge
international physician audience. It opens up enormous opportunities, with
international communications, marketing, education and research programmes
all capable of being managed and measured in a fully integrated way.”

Networks in Health is supported by medeConnect, its market research and
insight partner, and independent division of Doctors.net.uk. Offering
community-based research – an alternative to less insightful panel-based
research - medeConnect offers a range of new, digitally-based qualitative
and quantitative methodologies for gathering insight from these
communities.

Organisations wanting more information about Networks in Health are asked
to contact Gareth Thomas, development director, on +44 (0) 1235 828400 or
gareth.thomas at networksinhealth.com.
</quote>

Link -> http://www.networksinhealth.com/news_content.aspx?newsid=16