In the News

Cambridge, MA and New York City, NY – February 16, 2010 – Today, PatientsLikeMe, the leading online community for patients with life-changing diseases, announces the acquisition of ReliefInsite, a pioneering online pain management company.

"Right now, there are more than 20,000 patients on PatientsLikeMe experiencing real pain," says Ben Heywood, President and Co-founder of PatientsLikeMe. "By acquiring ReliefInsite, we can improve the way we help patients effectively manage their pain."

Conceived by founder Fred Eberlein in 2000, ReliefInsite's patented online pain management technology developed into a secure HIPAA-compliant platform designed to help patients monitor their pain levels and share that information directly with their doctors.

"I've spent more than a decade inventing and advancing the technology platform at ReliefInsite to help patients manage their pain and improve the patient-doctor relationship," says Eberlein. "I'm excited this work has led me to my new home at PatientsLikeMe, where we can work together to better align industry's interests with improving patients' quality of life."

ReliefInsite will continue to support its existing pharmaceutical and clinical clients as its functionality is integrated into the PatientsLikeMe platform. Eberlein joins the PatientsLikeMe team to lead the companies' integration and enhance product offerings for partners in the life sciences industry.

Pain is a common symptom for people with all of the diseases on PatientsLikeMe, and is most prevalent in diseases like fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis. In the depression community, thousands of patients report they are currently experiencing "back pain" or "stomach pain," with 50% of those members describing their pain as moderate or severe. Across all of the disease communities, pain is a topic of discussion in more than 61,000 forum posts. Additionally, patients are using hundreds of treatment options to manage their pain from prescription medications, such as Cymbalta and Lyrica, to alternative solutions like acupuncture, massage and physical therapy.

About PatientsLikeMe
PatientsLikeMe (www.patientslikeme.com) is the leading online health community for patients with life-changing conditions. PatientsLikeMe creates new knowledge by charting the real-world course of disease through the shared experiences of patients with ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, HIV, mood conditions (including depression, bipolar, anxiety, OCD and PTSD), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis, and epilepsy. While patients interact to help improve their outcomes, the data they provide helps researchers learn how these diseases act in the real world. PatientsLikeMe endeavors to create the largest repository of real-world disease information to help accelerate the discovery of new, more effective treatments.

Albany, NY – August 7, 2007 – ReliefInsite today announced the launch of its new HIPAA compliant, web-based pain management service, ReliefInsite.com™ (http://www.reliefinsite.com.). The service is designed to help patients record and track their pain, medications and related information, and securely share it with their doctors, nurses, pain specialists, therapists, family members and friends. Developed in collaboration with physicians and top pain management experts, ReliefInsite is based on proven medical standards and practices. More than 3000 users registered for the service's initial beta testing period. ReliefInsite can be used by anyone who has access to the Internet, and all patient information is stored on secure servers to ensure personal privacy.

Research has shown that patient self-reporting plays a critical role in pain management. The ReliefInsite service provides a variety of tools designed to help patients record their pain, its location and intensity, and track related details including symptoms, medications, treatments and the impact their condition is having on day-to-day functionality. Unlike paper diaries that are widely used in medicine, all entries in ReliefInsite are time-stamped and organized into graphical reports that provide an on-going view of the patient's condition that can be interpreted in seconds.

ReliefInsite is also implementing an interactive voice response (IVR) module that allows patients to make their diary entries over the phone. A fax-in module is also available that enables healthcare providers to fax pain assessment or other forms directly into the patient's diary record.

"If you suffer from chronic pain, as do some 50 million Americans, you should be recording your pain at regular intervals to track improvement, deterioration, or treatment-related complications," said Edgar Ross, MD, Director of the Pain and Palliative Care Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and author of Pain Management: Hot Topics. "ReliefInsite's pain diary service provides an easy way for patients to convey their symptoms and treatment outcomes in a format that will help their doctors provide better treatment."

According to the National Institutes of Health's New Directions in Pain Research, pain is the most common reason individuals seek medical care, with millions of medical visits annually costing the American public more than $100 billion each year in health care, compensation and litigation. If untreated or under-treated, pain can cause significant and unnecessary physical, emotional and financial harm. It can even decrease the body's immune response system, making pain sufferers more susceptible to disease.

Medical science now stresses the importance of treating pain early and aggressively, and it is for this reason that doctors and other healthcare providers are required to ask patients about their pain. With this increased awareness of pain treatment comes increased concern about the prescription of pain medications, leading many physicians to seek more efficient ways to analyze and monitor the effectiveness of prescribed treatments. ReliefInsite enables patients with pain to be better understood and helps healthcare providers to better assess their patients' conditions and track outcomes.

"ReliefInsite has helped me work with my doctor to manage my pain and medications," said Dean Semograd, who suffers from chronic back pain and partial paralysis. "The medications I take are strictly monitored, so it's very helpful to my doctor when I present him with my personal diary of symptoms and responses to medications. With that data he can more easily determine if changes in drugs or dosages are required to better manage my pain, and he has the data he needs in order to back up his decisions," Semograd added.

"I looked over my first 3 patients' diaries and all I can say is WOW!!!!" said Deborah Metzger, MD, PhD of Harmony Women's Health based in Los Altos, CA. "I have already altered the treatment of two patients based on this info."

A Case Management version of the ReliefInsite service is also available and is ideal for organizations large and small that are looking for an easy and inexpensive means for monitoring patients and reporting outcomes.

"Gathering, tracking and communicating detailed patient information is essential to the work we do," said Scott Snyder, president of the Snyder Center of Pain Pharmacology, the nation's only compounding pharmacy that works exclusively with patients suffering from chronic pain. "The ReliefInsite Case Management system has been a remarkable tool for us, both in the development and fine-tuning of customized pain therapies. It is fast, intuitive and it enables us to collect data from patients over the phone and turn it into clear visuals that help us show doctors exactly how patients are responding to treatments and when adjustments in therapies are needed," Snyder added.

The ReliefInsite electronic pain diary is available at http://www.reliefinsite.com. Free and Premium versions are available for direct use by consumers. Healthcare Provider and Case Management versions are also available directly over the Internet.