Remote possibilities.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: ON SMALL BIZ - Spineconnect.com - Column

It wasn't even noon yet, the day after Labor Day, and Dr. Jim Youssef had already performed his third spinal surgery, with two to go, when I reached him by phone at Durango's Mercy Hospital.

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When Youssef moved with his wife and three kids from California to the spectacular but remote southwest Colorado town of Durango in 1997, he was the first fellowship-trained spine surgeon on the Western Slope. The distinction came with a downside.

"I was kind of isolated from colleagues or anyone that I could share cases with," says Youssef, 43. "I had good friends at university settings--UC-Davis and the University of Utah, and Dartmouth where I did my training--but I didn't have anyone that I could talk to directly or face to face."

As is so often the case where necessity leads to innovation, the scarcity of spine-surgery peers led Youssef and fellow Cal-Berkeley alumnus Scott Capdevielle in 2000 to launch Syndicom, a platform for online collaboration and knowledge sharing for medical professionals.

Surgeons are the most obvious beneficiaries of Syndicom's online forums such as Spineconnect.com. But the company's revenues come from medical-device makers like Johnson & Johnson and Stryker, which are always looking for a way to connect with surgeons and thus are willing to pay for doctors' memberships to Syndicom's online information-sharing tools. Syndicom even hosts FDA trials for medical-device makers and participating doctors.

"Medical-device people pay for it for a variety of reasons," says Youssef, the company's vice president of medical business development. "One is they want to have access to that number of surgeons and get in front of those people. But they also need to train people on new technologies, like an artificial disc."

So far, Syndicom's membership has increased to more than 900 spine surgeons from 25 countries and is growing about 10 percent to 15 percent per month, says Youssef. The company has about 15 employees and about 15 medical-device company clients.

"The surgeons are the primary users," says Capdevielle, the company's CEO. "But more and more, as we sell this software, it's the device companies and executives and business teams that derive a lot of value from it, because they're able to interact with surgeons much more frequently by doing it online."

Syndicom typically charges medical-device makers a setup fee between $2,500 and $10,000. The company also charges a per-seat fee of about $500 per year.

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