IMS Health Gives Insight Into What Drug Companies Pay For Prescription Info
IMS Health Holdings is a company that uses data on prescriptions from pharmacies and sells it to pharmaceutical companies. In the first three quarters of last year, IMS made nearly $2 billion, with almost two thirds accredited to information sales. The information has become public because IMS has filed for a public stock offering.
Companies such as IMS are known as prescription drug information intermediaries. They are valuable to drug companies because they provide drug sales representatives with information on which kinds of drugs doctors are prescribing. With this information, sales representatives know if they have a good chance of making a sale even before talking to doctors. IMS save the drug industry time and money by increasing efficiency of the sales representatives.
IMS houses all types of medical information, and the company states that it holds “
IMS is expanding across the globe and the company’s prospectus claims that each member of the top 100 global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are clients. Dr. Randall Stafford, a professor at Stanford, claims that IMS has expanded quickly through acquiring data companies, “They’ve been trying to beef up their competitiveness in some areas by making all of these acquisitions.”
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