IQVIA
IQVIA, formerly Quintiles and IMS Health, Inc., is an American multinational company serving the combined industries of health information technology and clinical research. IQVIA is a provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services, focused primarily on Phase I-IV clinical trials and associated laboratory and analytical services, including consulting services. It has a network of more than 88,000 employees in more than 100 countries and a market capitalization of $49 Billion as of August 2021. As of 2017, IQVIA was reported to be one of the world's largest contract research organizations. History. IQVIA is the result  of the 2016 merger of Quintiles, a leading global contract research organization, and IMS Health, a leading healthcare data and analytics provider The name of the modern company honors the legacy organizations. IQVIA: I (IMS Health), Q (Quintiles), and VIA (by way of). IMS Health. IMS Health was best known for its collection of healthcare information spanning sales, de-identified prescription data, medical claims, electronic medical records and social media. IMS Health's products and services were used by companies to develop commercialization plans and portfolio strategies, to select patient and physician populations for specific therapies, and to measure the  effectiveness of pharmaceutical marketing and sales resources. The firm used its data to produce syndicated reports such as market forecasts and market intelligence. The original name of the company was Intercontinental Marketing Statistics, hence the IMS name. IMS Health's corporate headquarters were located in Danbury, Connecticut, United States. Ari Bousbib was the chairman and CEO of IMS Health before the merger. Quintiles. Quintiles was the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services. The company offered clinical data management, clinical trial execution services, pharmaceuticals, drug development, financial partnering, and commercialization expertise to companies in the biotechnology , pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. In 1982, Dennis Gillings founded and incorporated Quintiles Transnational in North Carolina. Quintiles Transnational established Quintiles Pacific Inc. and Quintiles Ireland Ltd. in 1990. In 1991 Quintiles GmbH was established in Germany and Quintiles Laboratories Ltd. was established in Atlanta, Georgia. In September 1996, Quintiles purchased Innovex Ltd. of Britain for $747.5 million in stock. Quintiles went public in 1997 and completed a successful secondary stock offering. IMS Health and Quintiles become IQVIA. In May 2016, Quintiles agreed plans to merge with IMS Health in a deal worth $9 billion dollars IMS Health shareholders  received 0.384 shares of Quintiles common stock for each share of IMS Health common stock they held, leaving the split of ownership at 51.4% IMS and 48.6% Quintiles. The merger was completed in October and the resulting company was a $17.6 billion company called QuintilesIMS. In November 2017, the company adopted the new name of IQVIA, and changed its ticker symbol on the NYSE from Q to IQV. Controversies. Throughout its history, the legacy IMS Health's business of collecting anonymized pharmaceutical sales data came under scrutiny from both the media and the legal system. "IMS Health v. Ayotte  was a free speech case involving IMS Health. Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. was a case about physician-data privacy, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court ruled in favor of the company. 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. The problems with how the survey results were collected were criticised for potentially leading to biased data by New Scientist".