Epocrates has a new CMO and EVP of Product Development

Epocrates has a new Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and Executive Vice President (EVP) of Product Development.

Geoffrey Rutledge, MD, PhD
CMO, EVP of Product Development, Epocrates

Dr. Rutledge has been in clinical practice for over 20 years as a physician, board certified in internal and emergency medicine. While practicing at San Mateo Medical Center, he was responsible for the strategy and implementation of highly successful outpatient and emergency department clinical information systems. As a medical executive at WebMD and Wellsphere, he developed two of the most popular online consumer health information services. Previously, he taught and practiced clinical medicine at Stanford University and Harvard Medical Schools, where he was principal investigator on NIH-supported research in clinical applications of medical information systems. He graduated from McGill medical school, completed a residency in internal medicine at UCSD Medical Center, and earned a doctorate in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford University.

Medscape is looking for a CME Scientific Director

If you have experience working in medical communications or medical education, then you may be interested in this job post. Medscape (one of the professional arms of WebMD) is looking for a Scientific Director to work on educational grant development. The world of certified continuing medical education (CME) is going through some significant changes these days and it's difficult to predict how CME will evolve over the next few years.

One of the most challenging aspects of generating a grant for CME is the needs assessment. If you're going to propose an educational activity on a specific topic, you have to prove that there's an educational gap that needs to be met with continuing education. Depending on the therapeutic area, it may be very challenging to identify such gaps. Then again, if you're an experienced CME grant writer, you already know that.

Everyday Health gets more visits than WebMD

According to Medical Marketing and Media, Everyday Health surpassed WebMD in unique visitors in October. According to comScore data, Everyday Health had 25.7 million unique visitors in October, compared with 19.6 million for WebMD. AOL Health was third with 10.4 million, followed by About.com Health at 9.1 million.

Have you visited Everyday Health? How about WebMD? As consumers aim to learn more about their personal health conditions, these types of health portals will receive more and more traffic.

If you're a healthcare provider, which website do recommend to your patients? Is the information reliable? Understandable? Up-to-date?

Medscape is now FINALLY copying Sermo

Medscape, perhaps the largest online resource for healthcare professionals, is finally copying Sermo with their "Physician Connect" physician-only online community. Medscape has had forums and other features to foster an online community, but uptake and usage has been very low. WebMD has really dominated the online healthcare space, so I'm surprised it's taken Medscape so long to come up with something like this. WebMD has been gobbling up other online professional resources like Medsite, eMedicine, and theHeart.org. These are all being placed under the "Medscape" umbrella of services.

I remember when Medscape was born. Most users at the time was using Netscape, so the name medscape really made sense. Now, hardly anyone uses Netscape to browse the web. Safari, Firefox, and Opera have taken over. Can we come up with some creative names based on these browsers? Medfari? Medfox? Medopera?

By the way, just like Sermo, Physician Connect requires physician validation.