Technology for Accelerating Innovation
Reaching every part of the world, IMS operates a massive technology infrastructure built around a high-capacity, high-availability global network — tuned to our clients’ exact requirements.
Organizations need to harness and apply a growing array of complex healthcare information — more quickly and efficiently than ever. Drawing on sophisticated IT assets and deep technology and industry know-how, we enable clients to power their execution and ensure mission success.
Capturing billions of healthcare transactions
The process starts with raw data, gathered from hundreds of thousands of sources in 100+ countries. To drive insights that are actionable and accurate, IMS leverages data points unparalleled in the industry — from drug manufacturers, wholesalers and retail pharmacies to hospitals, long-term care facilities, pharmacy benefit managers, healthcare professionals and government agencies. We employ robust encryption methods to ensure the confidentiality of our data resources.
- 40+ billion transactions processed annually, covering every major market
- 99,000+ suppliers, 768,000 reporting facilities worldwide
- Only company tracking more than 80% of global pharmaceutical sales, and 1.4M pharmaceutical products
- Information on more than 260M patient-anonymous records for unparalleled treatment insights
Bringing structure to massive volumes of data
IMS operations handle tremendous amounts of information — backed by the expertise of thousands of talented statisticians, economists, MDs, chemists, IT and Six Sigma professionals. Detailed knowledge of local healthcare systems enables us to check, refine, standardize and assign incoming data to vast “knowledge banks”— prescription, sales, promotional, medical and anonymized patient-level databases. Through our dynamic infrastructure, we track and measure the performance and patterns of a host of products, providers, payers and patient populations.
- Experts in data collection, integration, projection and validation, systems architecture, software development, and technology infrastructure
- Global Data Center with more than 4,900 servers, 4,400 “virtual” Wintel servers, 5 petabytes of online storage, and 16 petabytes of archived storage
- Over 730,000 client-specific reports generated and validated annually
- 5,000 discrete databases supporting 16,000 healthcare clients, including pharma, biotech, payers and providers
- Healthcare reference asset covering more than 5M professionals, with 500,000 organizational linkages and 2.4M affiliations
Investing in best-of-breed technologies for flexible solutions
We place a strong emphasis on standardizing and automating applications, databases and hardware to continuously improve client service. Our ability to draw from multiple core information sets drives advantages in flexibility, operating efficiencies and the richness and quality of our offerings. Through alliances with technology partners, we take the lead in applying innovative capabilities for visualization, information integration, text mining and analytics. And, we can take on responsibility for clients’ entire business intelligence processes, so they can direct their resources more strategically.
- Advanced technologies for storage and network virtualization deployed within an environment comprising Linux, Wintel, Unix and mainframe servers
- Utilizes flexible delivery choices like private cloud and grid computing
- Global network connecting clients, suppliers and IMS in more than 100 locations via Virtual Private Networks. Secure client portal serves 22,000+ registered users.
- Thousands of proprietary methodologies, including patented systems for analytics, data encryption and forecasting
- ISO 9001:2008-certified delivery operations in many countries; SSAE 16 certification in the U.S.
- 24/7 x 365 environment with ITIL-based processes in place to support change and configuration management
- Flexible delivery model — from advisory services to full outsourcing — with expert resources
Applying Technology in New Ways
How we connect data, systems, processes and talent for better healthcare.
