Digital Pharma: OnMedica set to reopen under new owners
pharmafile | July 21, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications | Binley's, Digital Pharma blog, OnMedica, digital doctors
A buyer has been found for the services of UK online doctors portal OnMedica, which have been on hold since June when the company went into liquidation.
Health information firm Binley’s acquired its assets, including brand names, websites and databases, in a deal that was finalised on 9 July.
The centerpiece of these is the online portal onmedica.com, which boasted a network of over 60,000 healthcare professionals. The site is still live but has not been updated since 14 June.
Steven Bushell, research and development coordinator at Binley’s, told Digital Pharma he hoped OnMedica’s services, including its online training and the reward scheme OnMedica Gold, would be back online shortly.
“We’re looking at having everything up and running within a couple of weeks,” he said, adding that the team at Binley’s was “working its socks off” to get the OnMedica services back to normal.
Less clear is the fate of OnMedica’s non-core assets, which include the medical search engine Dr Socrates and Medefero, a social networking site for clinicians that OnMedica launched last October.
There is also the Windsor-based medical communications agency MedSci, which became a new division of the OnMedica Group in a September 2009 deal.
OnMedica’s Asian expansion
Similarly up in the air is the fate of OnMedica’s ambitious Asian expansion plans, which had just started to bear fruit. A portal for Indian healthcare professionals was launched just two months ago as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UK OnMedica Group.
Chennai-based OnMedica.in was a dedicated website for the country’s healthcare professionals and saw the company partnering with Indian academics and general practitioners.
The plan was for it to follow the same business model as the UK business, whereby revenue would come from the sale of online learning materials, sponsorship, marketing, promotion and advertising.
The Indian operations were to have been the first step in the company’s Asian expansion, and further bases planned in Singapore and Hong Kong.
In an interview conducted before OnMedica went under, its executive chairman Steven Myint said the company’s strategy centred on developing the right networks to connect with healthcare professionals in the most effective way.
“There is a new generation of doctors who do not read books now. They read all the information from their mobile phones. This generation of doctors will get their educational materials as ‘bite-sized’ chunks and getting that information across requires novel and innovative ways,” he told Gene Wired in May.
Increased competition for doctors’ time?
Established in 1999, Hemel Hempstead-based OnMedica previously employed around 30 members of staff, all of whom were made redundant in June.
There were suggestions OnMedica had recently found it increasingly difficult to compete as a generalist commercial platform against more specialist peer-driven social networks perceived as being more neutral.
But one source close to the company said it was in the best financial position it had been in for a very long time.
The source told Digital Pharma the company was put into liquidation at very short notice, despite a number of companies expressing an interest in buying the business.
One firm rumoured to have been interested in acquiring OnMedica was its Oxford-based rival Doctors.net.uk.
That company has been expanding its horizons recently, acquiring Swedish online physician community MedUniverse and signing a strategic alliance in Latin America and Iberia with online healthcare marketing company Medcenter Holdings.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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