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Sermo Partners with Penn Center for Bioethics to Develop Ethical Guidelines for Market-Based Clinical Informatics

Sermo works with leading ethics group to enhance its mission of accelerating the discovery of new trends in medicine

Cambridge, MA - Oct. 27, 2006 — Sermo, the fastest growing online community created by physicians for physicians, has announced a partnership with Arthur Caplan, Ph. D., and the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, to expand the development of ethical guidelines for Sermo and Sermo's users. Dr. Caplan is the Founding Director of the Center for Bioethics, as well as an author or editor of twenty-five books and over 500 papers in referenced journals of medicine, science, philosophy, bioethics and health policy. Dr. Caplan and the Bioethics Center will also work with Sermo to build an ethics council, overseeing Sermo's efforts on an ongoing basis as it establishes a new field of clinical informatics.

Sermo has created a business model that is changing the way new medical insights are gathered and then communicated among physicians. Organizations across the healthcare and investment industries as well as public health interests are finding value in the information generated in this real-time physician exchange. Sermo is the first system to utilize instantaneous peer review and a market-based approach to information aggregation to detect and then validate critical healthcare information. With its mandatory physician credential checking and patent-pending authentication process, Sermo uses peer review, predictive theory and user-reviewed rating systems to ensure the medical reporting of observations from daily practice is accurate and corroborated by peers. With the University of Pennsylvania partnership, Sermo announces the first in a series of efforts to collaborate with the nation's top life science and medicine experts to ensure the most appropriate use of Sermo's growing dataset and research platform.

"Sermo is a ground breaking site providing unprecedented value to our society by gathering and sharing raw data directly from MDs around patient care, drug treatments and healthcare as a whole," said Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., founding director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "The need to ensure ethical guidelines for the use of such data is crucial. Our group has great experience managing moral issues and societal implications around medicine and healthcare, and we look forward to applying that history and knowledge to help Sermo focus on its mission to ultimately improve healthcare in this nation."

Just as they do in daily practice, on Sermo physicians openly discuss and post insights about healthcare and medicine. This includes postings about new approaches in disease management, changes in pathogen sensitivities to treatments, and adverse events with drugs and devices. Sermo is utilizing entirely new technologies and new systems of information gathering, creating new questions about the ethical boundaries of aggregating and managing this information in real-time. Although Sermo has paying clients and selectively pays physicians for their insight, less than 1% of the activity on the system has any compensation associated with it. The majority of the information generated has patient safety or humanitarian implications, but would not necessarily be information that Sermo's current client set would pay for. Sermo's continuing investment in its ethics guidelines and oversight reflects our strong commitment to make sure this information is quickly and effectively distributed to those parties that can make the best use of it.

Sermo Partners with Penn Center for Bioethics

The partnership with Dr. Caplan and the University of Pennsylvania is one of many steps Sermo is taking to ensure that we are building appropriate means to handle information that can substantially affect the public health." said Dr. Daniel Palestrant, Founder and CEO. "We are extremely excited to work with someone as well respected and knowledgeable as Dr. Arthur Caplan."

Sermo clients benefit from the Sermo community's early insight into clinical events. Through information arbitrage, they are able to:

  • Help forecast potential problems or new uses for commercially significant medical products and therapies;
  • Gain early insight into outbreaks and other changes in disease states and conditions that can affect the public health;
  • Perform epidemiologic research investigations;
  • Perform real-time surveys of the opinion of practicing physicians on topics related to medical care;
  • Assess the success and adoption of best practice recommendations;
  • Find opportunities to improve medical practice, and protect and promote patient safety and the public health.

    • About the Center for Bioethics at UPenn
    The Center for Bioethics is a leader in bioethics research and its deployment in the ethical, efficient, and compassionate practice of the life sciences and medicine. Under the leadership of its founding director, Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., the Center has become a world-renowned educational and research enterprise that employs over 20 full and part-time faculty (Senior Fellows and Associates) with appointments in a number of University of Pennsylvania schools and departments including medicine, law, nursing, business, education, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies and public policy. The Center is home to: a distinguished faculty that produces and disseminates first-rate scholarship; the fastest growing bioethics journal in North America; the leading bioethics Master program in the nation; and the most widely utilized bioethics resources on the Internet in the world.

    About Sermo
    Launched September 2006, Sermo is already the fastest growing online community, created by physicians for physicians. Its 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 new insights on medications, devices, and treatments. Through Sermo, physicians exchange knowledge with each other the minute it is learned, and gain 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 dramatically impact patient care. For more information visit www.sermo.com.

    Press Contact:
    Chris Perkett or Heather Mosley
    PerkettPR for Sermo
    P: 781-834-5852 or 415-384-0113
    E: sermo@perkettpr.com

    Greg Shenk
    Director of Communications
    P: 617-497-1110
    gshenk@sermo.com