Sermo Partners with Leading Clinical Surveillance Team to Improve Monitoring of Adverse Drug Events.

Online physicians' community furthers strategy to partner with the world's leading authorities to advance better health care nationwide

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Sermo, the fastest growing online community created by physicians for physicians, has announced a partnership with Charles L. Bennett, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.P., to strategize the best methods for utilizing the collective medical knowledge gathered on Sermo in order to enhance and improve traditional reporting systems for adverse drug events. Dr. Bennett is the Principal Investigator in the Research for Adverse Drug Events And Reports (RADAR) program, funded by multi-year grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). RADAR's multidisciplinary team consists of healthcare professionals such as physicians, pharmacists, epidemiologists, and statisticians that investigate and disseminate information on adverse drug reactions. The hypotheses in the program are derived from clinical observations instead of data mining or basic science findings and, as with Sermo, the RADAR program is revealing the power of communication in a professional network to yield important healthcare discoveries.

Both Sermo and RADAR are independent entities that aim to improve upon and augment traditional adverse reporting systems, such as those run by the FDA. Through the partnership, Sermo and RADAR will collaborate on experiments in which signals identified in one system are investigated in the other system, to further examine the impact of reporting about adverse events. Collectively, this partnership is designed to compare and reveal the best clinical reporting systems - both traditional and next generation - identifying the best way resources should be allocated to protect patients from adverse events caused by drugs and medical devices.

Monitoring of potential problems with drugs is an important part of the system of drug regulation in the United States. This monitoring is accomplished through various reporting systems, most notably the FDA's MedWatch program, which collects both mandatory and voluntary reports from health professionals. With recent scandals related to the safety of drugs like Vioxx and Phen-Fen, there has been public criticism that the FDA's current efforts to monitor drug safety are inadequate. The FDA MedWatch program is an attempt to perform a complicated task: getting health professionals to voluntarily submit information, and then divining the truly significant information from among approximately 800,000 reports submitted each year.

Sermo provides a new way to gather information on adverse drug events that differs from traditional event reporting systems in two important ways: 1) on Sermo, physicians are given multiple incentives to submit information, and 2) Sermo uses the physician community itself to determine what is important, rather than relying on a small group of researchers to review massive amounts of information.

The Sermo system is thus designed to be completely scalable, so that the more information submitted to Sermo, the better it can identify new trends in medicine. In contrast, although the MedWatch program is sometimes criticized for recording only around 10 percent of the estimated adverse reactions that occur, it already struggles to effectively sort through the large amount of information it receives. Sermo and Dr. Bennett's RADAR program share the similar goal of improving upon existing adverse event surveillance efforts. The RADAR program relies on a small connected group of researchers who actively aggregate information on what they judge to be potentially important emerging topics. Sermo is working with Dr. Bennett to compare these alternative approaches and to build improvements in all systems of drug event reporting to better the public health.

"Sermo is a new and powerful tool in the mission to improve patient care. It enables physicians across the nation to easily and instantly share information and insights with each other based on what they are seeing on a day-to-day basis," said Charles L. Bennett, MD, PhD. "Serious adverse drug reactions (SADRs) account for over 100,000 deaths annually, and the medical community needs to continuously look at ways to improve our discovery and response to such reactions. We are eager to work with Sermo to help augment the efforts already in place by entities such as the FDA and our own research through the RADAR program."

On Sermo, physicians openly discuss and post insights about healthcare and medicine, just as they do face-to-face in daily practice, albeit with a wider peer group. This valuable information is gathered and analyzed by Sermo and its partners to identify new trends of significance to clinical practice and public health. In the case of adverse drug events, Sermo is a powerful new data source to monitor and investigate potential problems with drugs. Sermo, and partners such as Dr. Bennett, help to organize and accelerate the reporting of such problems, identifying the most crucial issues first - potentially saving lives and ultimately improving patient safety and care.

"Sermo and programs like Dr. Bennett's RADAR are focused on finding new ways to aggregate information to help physicians actively improve healthcare and drug safety," said Dr. Daniel Palestrant, CEO and Founder of Sermo. "It's exhilarating to see how quickly the Sermo community is identifying patterns and trends in medicine. We will continue to gather this critical information and work with worldwide leaders such as Dr. Bennett to analyze and disseminate it appropriately for the overall health of patients nationwide."

About Charles L. Bennett, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.P.

Charles L. Bennett is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Co-Director of the Cancer Control Program of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, and the Associate Director of the Midwest Center for Health Services Research and Policy Studies. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, completed his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 and his internship and residency at Michael Reese Hospital, Chicago, Illinois in 1984. In 1987, he completed his fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Bennett received his MPP and PhD in Public Policy from RAND Graduate School, Santa Monica, California in 1989. He is board certified in internal medicine with a medical oncology subspecialty.

Dr. Bennett joined the VA in 1989 and Northwestern University in 1994. He is an active member of practice and outcomes assessment committees for the American Society of Hematology, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Cancer Center Network, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group. He is an editor for the Journal of Clinical Prostate Cancer and a reviewer for several hematology and oncology journals.

Dr. Bennett's major research interests are in the areas of the identification and dissemination of information on adverse drug reactions; costs and quality of cancer care; health policy and minority issues for cancer patients; low literacy; and cancer prevention, screening, detection, and treatment. His research also involves minority and medically underserved patients with prostate, breast or ovarian cancer. Dr. Bennett has been the Principal Investigator on numerous NIH, VA, American Cancer Society, and industry-funded projects in these disciplines. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles on these topics, and is an invited speaker at regional and national meetings in these areas. His background in oncology has allowed him to amplify topics in the direction of basic science.

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 Co rapidly and in large numbers Co 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.