[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 firms 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 companys 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 doctors
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 worlds
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 firms 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.
Theyve 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.
IMSs prospectus offers examples of the questions
companies are able to answer with its data,
including which providers generate the highest
return on a sales reps visit, whether a rep
drives appropriate prescribing and how much reps should be paid.
IMS Healths 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 arent
asked before pharmacies sell information about them.
Stafford said those concerns have parallels to
recent revelations about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Its part of a larger dialogue, which things
like the NSA scandal have brought up, he said.
Theres a lot of data out there that people
dont necessarily know about. ... Were 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 Kingdoms 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 IMSs 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
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