IQVIA

IQVIA Holdings, Inc. is an American company based in Durham, North Carolina, focused on health information technology and clinical research.

The company operates three divisions: Technology & Analytics (40% of 2024 revenues), focused on health information technology with access to 1.2 billion unique non-identified patient records globally, offers cloud-based customer relationship management application software as well as analytics consulting services all to the healthcare industry; Research & Development (55% of 2024 revenues), which is a contract research organization that handles all aspects of clinical trials including phase I through IV clinical trial management, clinical pharmacology, post-approval services, regulatory affairs, protocol design, operational planning, study and site start-up, patient recruitment, project management, monitoring, data management and biostatistics; and Contract Sales & Medical (5% of 2024 revenues), which offers contract sales to healthcare providers and patient engagement services.[1]

The company is ranked 282nd on the Fortune 500[2] and 680th on the Forbes Global 2000.[3]

The company has been criticized for collecting and selling patient medical records even though the data is anonymized.

IQVIA was formed in 2016 from the merger of Quintiles, a contract research organization, and IMS Health, a healthcare data and analytics provider and the largest vendor of U.S. physician prescribing data.[4][5][6] The IQVIA name is a combination of: I (IMS Health), Q (Quintiles), and VIA (by way of).

History

Controversies

IMS Health's business of collecting and selling pharmaceutical sales data, even though it is anonymized, was under scrutiny from both the media and the legal system.[16]

IMS Health v. Ayotte was a free speech case involving IMS Health.[17][18][19]

Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. was a case about physician-data privacy, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court ruled in favor of the company.[20][21][22][23]

IQVIA was contracted by the UK government's Office of National Statistics to provide data on the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in the population. Some users of the survey reported problems contacting IQVIA and arranging for testing.[24] The problems with how the survey results were collected were criticised for potentially leading to biased data by New Scientist.[25]

On July 17, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block IQVIA’s acquisition of Propel Media alleging in an administrative complaint that the acquisition would give IQVIA a market-leading position in health care programmatic advertising and would raise health-care prices for consumers. In December 2023, U.S. District Court Judge Edgardo Ramos issued an order granting the FTC’s motion for preliminary injunction to block the merger. Speaking in favor of the FTC, Ramos said, "The FTC has shown that there is a reasonable probability that the proposed acquisition will substantially impair competition in the relevant market and that the equities weigh in favor of injunctive relief." An administrative trial was scheduled to start on January 18, 2024.[26][27][28] However, on January 5, 2024, IQVIA and Propel Media announced that they had mutually agreed to abandon the proposed merger.[29]

External links