Recent Announcements

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sermo and FDA Enter Into Evaluation Agreement

FDA/CDRH to assess the Sermo platform and information from its online physician community in discovering and clarifying safety issues related to medical devices

Cambridge, Mass., August 28, 2007 — Sermo, the nation’s largest online physician community, announced today that it has entered into an evaluation agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the FDA/Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) to access Sermo’s online physician community. This agreement follows Sermo’s recently announced multi-year strategic partnership with the American Medical Association (AMA), which also focuses on harnessing the collective insights and observations of Sermo physicians.

For the next six months, the FDA will be monitoring the information from the Sermo community and utilizing Sermo’s underlying aggregation system for evaluating physicians’ clinical observations. The FDA will access the community through Sermo AlphaMD, the company’s client interface. During the first two months of the agreement, FDA staff will observe the types of information shared on Sermo. For the remaining four months, FDA/CDRH will be more actively involved in the Sermo community, focusing on new ways to improve communication with practicing physicians.

A physicians-only online community, Sermo boasts an active membership of nearly 30,000 U.S. physicians and is currently growing by more than 1000 physicians per week. The Sermo community has become an important way for physicians to connect with each other, build consensus around important medical trends, and exchange insights about drugs, devices, and treatment options. Sermo then aggregates the information shared by physicians to help its clients rapidly identify emerging trends of significance to medicine and the public health.

“Sermo provides a new channel to access early insights and observations of practicing physicians, and is seeking out strategic partners to make the best use of this valuable information. Through alliances with its acclaimed partners, Sermo is empowering physicians by giving them a collective voice to directly inform and effect change in medicine and healthcare,” said Alex Frost, Vice President of Research Initiatives for Sermo. “We are excited about working with the FDA to explore opportunities and introduce new ways in which physicians can become more efficiently involved in the surveillance of medical product safety.”

About Sermo
Launched in September 2006, Sermo is already the largest online physician community, ever. Sermo’s Web-based platform provides a medium for physicians to aggregate observations from daily practice then — rapidly and in large numbers — challenge or corroborate each other’s opinions, accelerating the discovery of emerging trends and providing new insights into medications, devices and treatments. On Sermo, physicians exchange knowledge with each other the minute it is learned and gain potentially life saving insights from colleagues as they happen instead of waiting to read about them in conventional media sources. Sermo harnesses the power of collective wisdom and enables physicians to discuss new clinical findings, report unusual events, and work together to improve patient care in a way never before possible. Through its unique business model, Sermo is free to physicians and has no advertising or promotion. Based on a system of information arbitrage, Sermo allows healthcare organizations, financial services firms and industry analysts to access the community’s collective knowledge on a subscription basis.

Press Contact:
Julie Blake
PerkettPR for Sermo
P: 781-344-4131
E: julie@perkettpr.com