Australia joins Europe

Australia's leading online physician community joins European Alliance

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

30 June 2011, Oxford: 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 LaRevue du Praticien in France, Medcenter in Spainand 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. community-based research - an approach which allows us to reach a broader cohort of physicians than ever before - medeConnect offers a range of new, digitally-based qualitative and quantitative methodologies for gathering insight from these communities.

Note: Englemed is the news provider for Networks in Health