Former Revolution Health president Tim Davenport is taking over as CEO of the physician network Sermo, the company announced Wednesday. His previous experience includes serving as an adviser to the chat tech startup Yobongo and as CEO of the investment firm Vastera.
Davenport’s arrival fills a gap created when founder Dr. Daniel Palestrant and chief medical officer Dr. Adam Sharp left in November to launch the startup Par8o.
Davenport told MM&M that Sermo is in a prime position to make itself an integral physician resource, and that internal research that showed Sermo, along with Facebook and YouTube, was among the best known brands for doing professional work online.
He said experience in building consumer communities is among the assets he brings to the company and that the “lessons are what did it take to evolve a vibrant online community,” which he described as “probably more of an art than a science.”
Davenport said understanding what makes Sermo’s community interactions valuable is part of this process and that the company is “still in the earliest days of figuring out how exactly we structure those experiences.”
