MDLinx

M3 USA Corporation
Formerly	MDLinx, Inc.
Industry	Internet-based service
Founded	1999 in United States
Founder	Evan Garfein, Robert Ashton
Headquarters	Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Brands	MDLinx; PracticeMatch; Smartest Doc; M3 Global Research
Owner	M3, Inc. [ja]
Website	usa.m3.com

MDLinx
Owner	M3 USA Corporation
URL	www.mdlinx.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required
Launched	1999; 25 years ago
Current status	Online
Content license	Proprietary

MDLinx is an internet-based service for

physicians

and healthcare professionals provided by M3 USA Corporation. It offers physicians and other healthcare professionals a means of staying current with academic literature. The typical medical specialist needs to read 30 to 80 journal articles every day to keep up with the flow of information in their specialty. MDLinx scans, sorts, summarizes, and disseminates new literature in a digestible form.

Healthcare professionals subscribe to the free service and opt to receive daily or weekly newsletters with summaries of and links to new journal articles in their areas of specialty. MDLinx users also receive information about

US, Japan and Korea, and access via partnerships to physician panels in other countries. According to Forrester Research, MDLinx is one of the most trafficked physician portals in the United States.^[2]

History

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.

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.^[4]

Merger

In 2006, MDLinx was fully acquired by So-net M3 USA (currently M3 USA), a wholly owned subsidiary of So-net M3 (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.^[5]

In February 2009, MDLinx announced its acceptance into

Council of American Survey Research Organizations, the industry's leading quality benchmark.^[6]

MDLinx currently has a patent pending for the way feasibility is calculated and market research is conducted on the internet.