The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) is the latest to jump into Health 2.0 with last week's launch of its own social networking site for Canadian physicians called Asklepios.    Asklepios joins a growing list of professional networking sites for health care practitioners, including sermo.com, within3.com, and ozmosis.com, just to name a few. 

Named for the Greek god of medicine and healing, the site is exclusive to Canadian physicians, residents and medical students and is bilingual (English and French).  Its features currently include personalized profile pages, access to groups and discussions, messaging, real-time chats, and events. 

The CMA will be doing a presentation on Asklepios at the Medicine 2.0 conference in Toronto on September 4.

It remains to be seen how Canadian physicians will receive Asklepios, as I suspect some of them may already be part of other health care professional networking sites.  As of today, there are only 114 members and 33 comments on Asklepios.  According to its website, the CMA has 67,000 members across the country.

On a related note, the CMA also launched its own health portal back in April called mydoctor.ca, which allows physicians to register their patients with online tools such as asthma tracker, blood pressure tool, weight tracker and personal health record. In addition, the portal provides secure messaging between patients and doctors.  Interestingly, my own family doctor is on mydoctor.ca; however, I am not aware that she’s used any of the available features and, in fact, her profile page hasn’t been updated with her new hours.