Sermo, a Cambridge-based social networking site for physicians, has reached an agreement with Bloomberg that gives financial analysts real-time access to the opinions of Joe the Doctor and 90,000 of his colleagues who have joined Sermo’s community.

The deal was announced late last week. It calls for the formation of The Healthcare Exchange, a new service that will be offered exclusively to the 280,000 analysts and investors worldwide who pay a premium for access to the Bloomberg Professional service. The Healthcare Exchange allows analysts and investors to post questions about drug therapies, medical devices and health care trends directly to Sermo’s physician community.

As they do regularly on Sermo, physician members will provide raw, unfiltered, iconoclastic responses based on their own personal experiences. The new information source, the parties propose, should complement the more tightly scrubbed, buttoned-down information flow that currently emanates from the academic medical community, pharmaceutical, biotech and device companies, and government agencies.

“The Healthcare Exchange tears down the barriers between those who need information and those who have it,” said Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant, MD while announcing the initiative during last week’s Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. “No small group of opinion leaders can compete with the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’” 

The announcement follows by just over a week the IOM’s decision to honor John Wennberg for his pioneering work in the area of evidence-based medicine.