MDLinx

Founding

MDLinx was founded in 1999 by Evan Garfein, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and Robert Ashton, a cardiothoracic surgical fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian. The surgeons saw a need for specialists to have access to information that was applicable to their fields. Alan Meckler, founder of high tech news publisher Mecklermedia and chief executive officer of venture capital firm Internet.com provided the upfront investment and Mehmet Oz, cardiothoracic surgeon and author, served on the Board of Directors. MDLinx was the first physician portal to offer an index of over a thousand journals segmented into over seven hundred subspecialties. In early 2006, MDLinx was credited with linking a doctor to a Mongolian boy in need of a heart operation.

Merger

In 2006, MDLinx was fully acquired by So-net M3 USA (currently M3 USA), a wholly owned subsidiary of So-net M3 (currently M3, Inc. (TYO: 2413)), a leading provider of online marketing solutions to the healthcare industry in Japan and an affiliate of Sony Communication Network Corporation (currently Sony Network Communications Inc.). Currently, Sony Corporation indirectly owns 39.4% of M3 USA. The company and its services including MDLinx are independently operated from Sony. With the merger, MDLinx expanded its offerings to healthcare professionals to include information on new drugs and CME programs.

In February 2009, MDLinx announced its acceptance into CASRO, the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, the industry's leading quality benchmark. MDLinx currently has a patent pending for the way feasibility is calculated and market research is conducted on the internet.