IMS Health

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IMS Health Holdings, Inc.
legal form Incorporated
founding 1954
resolution October 2016
Reason for dissolution Merger with QuintilesIMS, from November 2017 IQVIA
Seat Danbury , Connecticut , United StatesUnited StatesUnited States 
management Ari Bousbib ( CEO )
Number of employees around 15,000 (2016)
sales $ 1.87 billion (2013)
Website www.imshealth.com

IMS Health was a publicly traded US company based in Danbury , Connecticut , engaged in market research , specifically advising pharmaceutical and healthcare companies ( payers , doctors and hospitals) in the sector. In October 2016, the company, whose shares were last traded on the NYSE on September 30, 2016, was merged with QuintilesIMS Holdings, Inc. ( QuintilesIMS for short ).

The company once employed around 7,600 people. The German subsidiary IMS Health GmbH & Co. OHG , based in Frankfurt am Main , employed 352 people as of December 31, 2014.

In November 2017 it was announced that QuintilesIMS had been renamed IQVIA.

history

IMS Health was founded in 1954 by Bill Frohlich and David Dubow. In 2010 IMS was acquired by TPG Capital, CPP Investment Board and Leonard Green & Partners; IMS Health was listed on the New York Stock Exchange ( NYSE ) under the symbol IMS in April 2014 .

Business model

IMS offered solutions in the areas of healthcare analysis and services, healthcare measurement and consulting. The company applied forecasting models and techniques to its information resources and tracked over a million pharmaceutical and healthcare products. According to the company, this corresponded to over 80 percent of all drug sales transactions worldwide. By integrating the anonymized patient data that IMS collected along with other basic data, interest groups from the health sector were able to analyze relationships between patients, prescribing doctors and payers. Companies use solutions from IMS for the following purposes:

  • Development of marketing plans and portfolio strategies
  • Determine the patient and physician populations who will derive the greatest clinical benefit from particular therapies
  • Disseminate information regarding new drugs to the right prescribing physicians to improve treatment decisions for patients
  • Properly allocate and measure the effectiveness of drug marketing and sales resources

Key figures

The company processed over 40 billion pharmaceutical and healthcare transactions annually . 80% of drug sales worldwide were tracked by IMS, affecting over 1.4 million products. The company provided anonymous information on more than 260 million patients worldwide. The IMS had 99,000 information sources and 768,000 separate data sources. There were 5,000 databases for 16,000 healthcare customers, including pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies , payers , doctors and hospitals. There was reference data on 4.4 million people working in the health sector, with links to 500,000 institutions / companies and 2.4 million partnerships. The company had thousands of proprietary procedures, including patented systems for analysis, data encryption, and forecasting.

Data protection, criticism and result

According to its own information, IMS ensured that the patient's privacy was protected and that sales data analyzes and studies were carried out with anonymized patient data.

In 2013 IMS Health came under fire in Germany in connection with the trade in allegedly insufficiently anonymized or encrypted patient data. IMS Health was one of the main buyers of this data sold by German pharmacy data centers.

At the end of August 2013, an intensive discussion arose in Austria and nationwide about whether the business model pursued by IMS was permissible. It became known to the public that patient data had been passed on to the company by doctors and hospitals, although there was uncertainty about the degree of anonymization of the data. An examination by the Austrian data protection commission was initiated and welcomed by IMS. It was proposed to ban what was considered to be “data trading”. According to a contract that was mentioned by a newspaper editor, not only the prescription, age and gender of the patient, but also diagnoses, therapies, laboratory values ​​and more should have been recorded. The Corruption Prosecutor investigated. In the further course it turned out that, according to the Vienna Medical Association, an interface for data acquisition had been installed by a software company in the practice software of doctors without asking the persons concerned. This company, INNOMED Gesellschaft für medical software applications GmbH, stated in a circular that this interface was deactivated by default. It assured that the data protection regulations would be observed and published the confidentiality obligation of IT service companies in accordance with § 15 of the Data Protection Act.

After a few months, in which a technical report by the Federal Ministry of Health was prepared and submitted to the Data Protection Commission, the investigations were discontinued at the end of December 2013: It turned out that IMS Health did not establish a personal reference to individual patients by legally permissible means the data could therefore not be traced back to the individual people (patients) and that therefore no data protection regulations had been violated.

In 2012, IMS Health was awarded the negative “Big Brother Award” for “marketing the transparent patient”, which is given to institutions that are particularly questionable in terms of data protection law.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b IMS Health IPO at $ 20 / share, values ​​co at about $ 6.64 billion , Reuters report on the IPO of April 3, 2014, accessed on April 4, 2014.
  2. ^ IMS Health: Facts at a Glance
  3. ↑ Annual financial statements for the 2014 financial year of IMS HEALTH GmbH & Co. OHG. In: Bundesanzeiger , March 29, 2016.
  4. ↑ QuintilesIMS is now IQVIA , PM IQVIA November 6, 2017, accessed November 7, 2017
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h Overview - Via IMS , imshealth.com, accessed on August 23, 2013
  6. ↑ Commitment to data protection , imshealth.com, accessed on August 23, 2013
  7. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from August 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spiegel.de
  8. ↑ https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bericht-Apotheken-verkaufen-ungenuegend-anonymisiert-Patientdaten-1937568.html
  9. ↑ http://www.golem.de/news/ims-health-patientdaten-sind-angeblich-nicht-rueckrechenbar-1308-101070.html
  10. ↑ [1] .
  11. ↑ Patient data export Contribution to a discussion by an expert.
  12. ↑ Press release on data protection review .
  13. ↑ Data trading in the daily newspaper "Kurier" from August 22, 2013.
  14. ↑ What doctors sell for 432 euros daily newspaper Die Presse from 22 August 2013.
  15. ↑ Patient data: Corruption prosecutor investigates daily newspaper Die Presse of August 26, 2013.
  16. ↑ Software company installed an interface to market researcher at doctors . Daily newspaper “Der Standard”, August 29, 2013 (queried September 2, 2013).
  17. ↑ Important information for INNOMED users (queried September 2, 2013; PDF; 51 kB).
  18. ↑ Austrian Data Protection Act ( Memento of the original dated August 22, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (queried September 2, 2013).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dsk.gv.at
  19. ↑ Data protection commission closes proceedings against IMS Health. Press release. In: OTS.at . December 30, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013.
  20. ↑ [2]