“For the first time, investors don’t have to listen to the CFO” to find out how a drug is doing, Hadari said in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York.

This isn’t the first time Wall Street has tried to get insight on the industry’s medical research and usage. Since the early 2000s, expert network firms like Gerson Lehrman Group Inc. and MEDACorp, owned by investment bank Leerink Partners LLC, have gained momentum by putting investors in touch with health professionals such as doctors and researchers.

The patient conversations Treato monitors range from broad to granular.

“I recently stopped using singular as I had a severe episode of depression,” a patient wrote on Medication.com, a thread Treato found despite the misspelling of Merck & Co.’s asthma drug Singulair. Among the more than 40,000 discussions about Pfizer Inc.’s cholesterol drug Lipitor, there’s a thread on Bodybuilding.com about cholesterol content in protein shakes, and whether they’re okay for someone on Lipitor.

Pharma First

Representatives for Pfizer and Merck declined to comment on the conversations Treato had gathered on their drugs.

Aggregating such data for trend analysis is an intriguing idea, said John Schroer, sector head of U.S. healthcare at New York-based Allianz Global Investors. For its part, Allianz listens in “the old fashioned way,” he said, observing patient blog posts or talking to disease-based organizations to hear about the patient experience.

Saama Technologies, another health-data gatherer, harvests data on patient conversations for healthcare organizations such as hospitals. The Campbell, California-based company isn’t marketing its findings to the financial sector, Scott Clark, vice president of life sciences and healthcare, said in an a telephone interview.

Hyde, of Decision Resources, like Funtleyder, has no first- hand experience with Treato and is yet to be convinced about big data tools for health investing.

Data Future