{"id":13689,"date":"2014-01-10T20:39:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-10T19:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/?p=13689"},"modified":"2014-01-10T20:39:42","modified_gmt":"2014-01-10T19:39:42","slug":"big-data-big-pharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.w-t-w.org\/en\/big-data-big-pharma\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Data Big Pharma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Ornstein Reporting: \u00a0\u00a0Need 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s revenues in 2012 reached $2.4 billion, about 60 percent of it from selling such information.<\/p>\n

The numbers became public because IMS, currently in private hands, recently filed to make a\u00a0public offering. \u00a0<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0The company\u2019s prospectus gives fresh insight into the huge dollars \u2013 and huge volumes of data \u2013 flowing through a little-watched industry.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The data maintained by the industry is huge. IMS, based in Danbury, Conn., says its collection includes \u201cover 85 percent of the world\u2019s prescriptions by sales revenue,\u201d as well as comprehensive, anonymous medical records for 400 million patients.<\/p>\n

All of this adds up to 10 petabytes worth of material \u2014 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. \u00a0 \u00a0Big Data \u00a0Big Pharma<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Big<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Ornstein Reporting: \u00a0\u00a0Need 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t