The American Medical Association is nothing if not clever. Now, the organization is working with a startup company that encourages doc to swap ideas online and charges investment firms to view postings that could serve as tip-offs to side effects and other market-moving medical trends, the Associated Press reports.

The partnership was struck with a company called Sermo, which wants to use a web site to tap into the collective wisdom of its growing network of 15,000 U.S. docs. The two-year deal allows the AMA to survey its members on hot topics, just as Sermo’s Wall Street subscribers solicit docs’ opinions to help guide trading decisions on drug and device stocks.

But some docs are skeptical the service can advance medical safety, and PhRMA frets the service will spread as much rumor as fact. The AMA, however, hopes the deal will open a new line of communication, allowing its 250,000 docs to share everything from advice about treating a patient’s unique symptoms to opinions on whether the FDA should approve an experimental drug.

This does sound like a win-win, but there are potential problems. If creating an online community is so important, the AMA should do so. The organization shouldn’t, however, be in the business of promoting a forum - which allows anonymous postings - in hopes of enticing Wall Street firms willing to pay $100,000 to $500,000 for an online tip sheet.

This isn’t really about serving public health. This is exploiting the AMA membership in a way that cynically values the info exchanged as a high-priced commodity to be used to bolster the AMA’s bottom line. Exchanging medical info is laudable, but peddling the info in a way that may result in manipulation doesn’t build credibility.

Here’s the rest of the AP story (without further commentary):

Nearly three-quarters of U.S. docs based outside hospitals practice alone or in groups of five or fewer physicians, and the isolation makes it hard for many doctors to keep up on breaking medical developments, says AMA chair Cecil Wilson, because they need to rely on journals, conventions, continuing ed and word of mouth.

Michael Tomblyn, a radiation oncologist at the University of Minnesota, said he logs on to Sermo several times a day between patient appointments and is now one of the service’s most frequent posters. “Someone can say, `I’ve got this one complicated case. Here’s the workup. Have you ever seen this before, and how would you manage it?’ Within three hours, you can have a dozen responses from physicians in three or four different specialties. With all the burdens of practicing medicine today, there is not a lot of time and effort put into creating a physican-to-physician community. That is really something Sermo has built.”

Sermo — the name means “conversation” in Latin — says 15,000 docs have signed up since its launch last September. For now, Sermo isn’t letting drug and device companies join a list of subscribers that Sermo says numbers “10 to 20″ financial services firms, including managers of hedge funds and mutual funds. Subscribers pay $100,000 to $500,000 a year.

Docs sign up free of charge by sharing personal info including medical license numbers. Sermo verifies the data against databases to try to prevent postings by non-doctors with an ax to grind, such as a pharmaceutical employee hyping a drug. Docs post anonymously, without having to disclose ties to drug or medical device makers.

Other docs rank postings based on whether the info appears credible — a “wisdom of the crowd” approach that Sermo says assigns low rankings to spurious claims that should be read with skepticism. Doctors can challenge or corroborate others’ postings.

As enticements, Sermo sometimes sends $20 checks to docs who regularly make highly ranked postings. “What we found early on is that the money was the smallest motivator,” says Sermo ceo Dan Palestrant, a former surgery resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “The biggest is the sense of community, and the ability to share ideas with one another.”

William Maisel, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess who recently chaired an FDA panel on heart stents, is skeptical the site will supplement government registries and industry systems to track unexpected drug reactions and device malfunctions.

“Incomplete, cryptic descriptions of drug adverse events or device malfunctions are not particularly useful in determining whether a true problem exists,” he says. “Without knowing the event rate — not just what went wrong, but out of how many patients exposed — it is difficult to separate a true problem from an expected event.”

PhRMA’s Alan Goldhammer worries that many docs will essentially be spreading rumors about drug side effects and could “short-circuit” clinical trials and reviews by drugmakers and the FDA.

Marc Harris, director of U.S. equity research for RBC Capital Markets, likes the data his stock specialists have picked up so far via Sermo. After a study in March raised questions about the effectiveness of drug-coated heart stents, RBC polled cardiologists to see whether they expected fewer surgeries to implant the devices.

“Within the first three or four days, we got responses from 100 doctors, and 65 percent of them expected a reduction. The jury’s still out over how valuable this data can be,” he says. “But if you think of it as part of the fabric of information investment managers could use to confirm their holdings, or for a mutual fund, that is valuable information.”