[LINK] Big Data +Big Pharma= Big$$

Jan Whitaker jwhit at janwhitaker.com
Thu Jan 16 14:29:20 AEDT 2014


Big Data + Big Pharma = Big Money
http://www.propublica.org/article/big-data-big-pharma-big-money#
by Charles Ornstein
ProPublica, Jan. 10, 2014, 12 p.m.

Need another reminder of how much drugmakers 
spend to discover what doctors are prescribing? 
Look no further than new documents from the leading keeper of such data.

IMS Health Holdings Inc. says it pulled in nearly 
$2 billion in the first nine months of 2013, much 
of it from sweeping up data from pharmacies and 
selling it to pharmaceutical and biotech 
companies. The firm’s revenues in 2012 reached 
$2.4 billion, about 60 percent of it from selling such information.

The numbers became public because IMS, currently 
in private hands, recently filed to make a public 
stock offering. The company’s prospectus gives 
fresh insight into the huge dollars – and huge 
volumes of data – flowing through a little-watched industry.

IMS and its competitors are known as prescription 
drug information intermediaries. Drug company 
sales representatives, using data these companies 
supply, can know before entering a doctor’s 
office if he or she favors their products or 
those of a competitor. The industry is 
controversial, with some doctors and patient 
groups saying it threatens the privacy of private medical information.

The data maintained by the industry is huge. IMS, 
based in Danbury, Conn., says its collection 
includes “over 85 percent of the world’s 
prescriptions by sales revenue,” as well as 
comprehensive, anonymous medical records for 400 million patients.

All of this adds up to 10 petabytes worth of 
material — or about 10 million gigabytes, a 
figure roughly equal to all of the websites and 
online books, movies, music and TV shows that 
have been stored by the nonprofit Internet Archive.

IMS Health says it processes and brings order to 
more than 45 billion health care transactions 
each year from more than 780,000 different feeds 
around the world. “All of the top 100 global 
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are 
clients” of its products, the firm’s prospectus says.

Dr. Randall Stafford, a Stanford University 
professor who has used IMS data for his research, 
said the company has grown markedly in recent 
years through acquisitions of competitors and 
other companies that host and analyze data. As 
the pharmaceutical industry has consolidated, he 
says, IMS has evolved by offering more services 
and expanding in China and India.

“They’ve been trying to beef up their 
competitiveness in some areas by making all of these acquisitions,” he said.

IMS has especially expanded its database of 
anonymous patient records, which can match 
patients’ diagnoses with their prescriptions and 
track changes over time, Stafford said.

IMS sells two types of products: information 
offerings and technology services. The 
information products allow pharmaceutical 
companies to get national snapshots of 
prescribing trends in more than 70 countries and 
data about individual prescribers in 50 countries.

IMS’s prospectus offers examples of the questions 
companies are able to answer with its data, 
including which providers generate the highest 
return on a sales rep’s visit, whether a rep 
drives appropriate prescribing and how much reps should be paid.

IMS Health’s data collection and sales have been controversial.

Several years ago, three states passed laws 
limiting the ability of IMS and companies like it 
to collect data on doctors’ prescriptions and 
sell it to drugmakers for marketing purposes. 
Their intent was to protect physician and patient 
privacy and to reduce health care costs by 
reducing marketing of brand-name drugs. Once a 
drug loses patent protection and becomes generic, promotion essentially ceases.

IMS and other companies sued, and the U.S. 
Supreme Court ultimately ruled in their favor, 
finding a First Amendment right to collect and 
sell the information. (ProPublica and a group of 
media companies filed a legal brief supporting IMS on First Amendment grounds.)

ProPublica has sought to purchase data on 
individual providers from IMS and some of its 
competitors but was told by each that it could 
not buy the information at any price.

Instead, reporters obtained data from Medicare on 
providers in its taxpayer-subsidized drug 
program, known as Part D, which fills more than 
one in every four prescriptions nationally. The 
data is now on Prescriber Checkup, where anyone 
can look up individual doctors and compare their 
prescriptions to peers in their specialty and state.

ProPublica has found that in Part D, some of the 
top prescribers of heavily marketed drugs 
received speaking fees from the companies that made them.

Physicians and privacy advocates have argued that 
prescription records could be used to glean 
information about specific patients’ conditions 
without their permission. In addition, physicians 
have argued that they have a right to privacy 
about the way they choose drugs — but aren’t 
asked before pharmacies sell information about them.

Stafford said those concerns have parallels to 
recent revelations about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.

“It’s part of a larger dialogue, which things 
like the NSA scandal have brought up,” he said. 
“There’s a lot of data out there that people 
don’t necessarily know about. ... We’re living in 
a time where people can accept some loss of 
privacy, but they at least want to know how their 
privacy is being compromised.”

In its prospectus, IMS cited several challenges 
to its growth, including data-protection laws, 
security breaches and increased competition from 
other data collectors. The filing notes that the 
United Kingdom’s National Health Service in 2011 
started releasing large volumes of data on doctor 
prescribing “at little or no charge, reducing the 
demand for our information services derived from similar data.”

Until 2010, IMS Health was a publicly traded 
company. At that point, it was acquired for $5.2 
billion, including debt, by private-equity groups 
and the Canadian pension board.

Bloomberg News, citing confidential sources, 
reported last fall that IMS’s owners may seek to 
value the company at $8 billion or more.

IMS Health declined to comment for this story, 
citing the regulatory quiet period before the 
public offering takes place. No date has been set.


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, 
you're gonna die, so how do you fill in the space 
between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

_ __________________ _



More information about the Link mailing list