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Even if you’ve never heard of IQVIA, the company most likely knows some things about you—if only in anonymized form. As Harvard University fellow Adam Tanner documents in his 2017 book Our Bodies, Our Data, IQVIA (formerly IMS Health), along with other companies such as IBM and Lexis-Nexus, regularly pay health care providers, pharmacies, clinical labs, and insurers for patients’ de-identified health records, prescribing data, insurance claims, and other information. Then they collate and sell this information to pharmaceutical companies and others who rely on such data for research and marketing. And business is good: IQVIA reported revenue of $2.5 billion in the second quarter of this year.
Until now, the proceeds from the booming health data–brokering industry have seldom been seen by the people who contribute the information in the first place. But that could be about to change, thanks to a new class of ...
