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What Does IMS Health Do, Anyway?

November 7, 2009 Doctors No Comments

By Jacob Goldstein

What Does IMS Health Do, Anyway?IMS Health is nearing a deal to sell itself for nearly $4 billion, the WSJ reports. That raises a simple question: What does IMS Health do, anyway?

Drug companies pay IMS for information about the prescribing habits of individual doctors. This, of course, is very valuable stuff for the drug company sales reps who make calls at doctors’ offices. IMS buys the raw prescription data — which doesn’t identify patients — from pharmacies.

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont have all passed laws banning the sale of information that identifies individual doctors’ prescribing habits, with proponents arguing that the business interferes with the doctor-patient relationship.

IMS and other companies in the business have challenged those laws, arguing that they violate the first amendment.

The courts have gone back and forth on the issue. Last year, a federal appeals court upheld the New Hampshire law, overturning a lower court’s ruling. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

Through the AMA, individual doctors can choose to restrict companies’ access to their prescribing data.

IMS’s business isn’t limited to selling prescription information about individual doctors. The company also does consulting work and big-picture analyses of trends in the drug business, among other things.

Image: iStockphoto

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