Sequence Medical is launching what it claims to be the first-ever individually customizable medical journal in the US.

The company's Journal of Medicine, launching in December, will be “the first and only peer-reviewed, multispecialty, indexed medical journal that is personalized to fit a physician's needs and then mailed to them in print form or available to them online,” the company said.

Sequence has assembled an editorial board for the venture and is soliciting original content for the magazine, a general version of which will go out monthly to all US medical libraries. But the magazine is also a platform for the firm's proprietary personalization system, by which physicians can order custom-built magazines – and advertisers can deliver customized promotions tailored to the individual physician, if they want.

“We've tried to set up personal marketing channels to each of our physician readers,” said founding partner Charles Benaiah, “so content can be specific to individual doctors.”
The publisher has signed up several “clients” (Benaiah shuns the term “advertiser,” since the journal also offers targeted editorial rep detail follow-up), including King Pharmaceutical, Boehringer-Ingelheim and Novartis.

As subscribers will be able to pick from dozens of topics or sub-specialties of interest, their choices will affect the frequency with which they get the magazine. Thus, said Benaiah, if a cardiologist chooses to receive only content related to hypertension and heart failure, she might receive the magazine quarterly, but should she choose all 15-20 topics within the specialty, she would get it monthly.

The Journal of Medicine will be the official journal of the Chronic Liver Disease Foundation, the Network for Oncology Communications and Research and the Coalition for Pain Education, and will cover 26 specialties.

Sequence also hopes to license its personalization system to other publishers.