Phase Forward Introduces Empirica Signal

Phase Forward Introduces Empirica™ Signal – Major New Release of Signal Detection and Management Product

Enhanced Version of Award-Winning WebVDME™ Product Renamed Under “Empirica™” Brand

BOSTON – DIA’s 44th Annual Meeting – June 19, 2008 – Phase Forward (NASDAQ: PFWD), a leading provider of data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety, today announced the Empirica Signal product, a major new release of the company’s flagship signal detection and management software formerly known as WebVDME. Empirica Signal joins the Empirica™ Trace product as the newest component of Phase Forward’s Empirica suite of pharmacovigilance and risk management products, which are developed by the company’s Lincoln Safety Group, one of the most experienced and respected teams in the safety industry.

Empirica Signal is a state-of-the-art data mining and knowledge management tool. It provides detection and quantification of safety signals through the use of advanced data mining techniques that can be applied to any spontaneous reporting database.
 
Important features of this new release include a customizable, easy-to-use portal interface that provides a graphical “at-a-glance” drug profile overview of products of interest, putting critical information at the fingertips of safety professionals. Empirica Signal also includes enhanced workflow and a revised general topic-tracking facility to document and track safety-related issues identified anywhere in the safety review process. Other new features include parameterized reports, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication and synchronization, and improved configuration, management and filtering capabilities.  Together, these features provide a much more powerful yet easier to use environment for detecting and managing safety signals throughout the product life cycle. The new release is expected to be available in July 2008.

“Our team has found that the new Empirica Signal interface brings together timely and relevant visual information in one place,” said Raymond Woosley, president of the Critical Path Institute. “The latest release provides the quantitative signal detection that we need for our analyses.”
 
“For this latest release of our signal detection and management product we understood our clients wanted increased ease of use and integration to allow more widespread deployment within the safety community,” said Chan Russell, president of Phase Forward’s Lincoln Safety Group. “We believe this latest release has achieved this, as well as offering an upgraded signal management capability that, together with other products in the Empirica Suite, provides the foundation for a comprehensive safety management system for our clients.”
 
The Empirica Suite of Products
The Empirica Suite is Phase Forward’s complete solution set for pharmacovigilance and risk management. In addition to Empirica Signal, the suite includes Empirica Trace for adverse event data management and reporting and its companion Electronic Case Submissions Module (ECSM), which offers full support for E2B submission of case reports to regulators and receipt of data via E2B standard files. The suite also includes Phase Forward’s Clinical Trials Signal Detection (CTSD™) system, which supports signal detection from clinical trial data.
 
Phase Forward’s safety products are used by regulatory authorities, biopharmas, medical device manufacturers and contract research organizations (CROs) of all sizes to implement proactive strategic pharmacovigilance programs. The product family name, Empirica, signifies the importance of empirical data in the decision-making process.

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