IMS Health has entered into a collaboration agreement with Health Intelligence Company LLC (HIC), which operates as Blue Health Intelligence, to leverage HIC’s secure healthcare claims database in IMS solutions, enabling biopharmaceutical organizations to advance the delivery of high-quality, cost-efficient care. The HIC database represents the industry’s most comprehensive and diverse commercial health plan claims database in the US.

Spanning all US geographies, settings of care and therapy areas, the HIC database complies with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) patient privacy safeguards. It will become part of the IMS LifeLink portfolio of patient-centred information, analytics and services, which presents a robust view of treatment decisions for more than 210 million de-identified patients in the US. The new capabilities will be offered as IMS PharMetrics Plus.

By establishing the industry’s most robust Real-World Evidence (RWE) platform, IMS is uniquely positioned to support the full range of activities required by healthcare stakeholders to examine the cost and effectiveness of medicines and health technologies. The agreement expands IMS’s extensive information assets and ability to link industry-leading healthcare information, including prescription drug, electronic medical record, hospital services and demographic data. The HIC database includes more than 110 million de-identified, commercially insured health plan members covered since 2005.

“By bringing together the collective data and intelligence of IMS and HIC, we are enabling decision makers to access, manage and gain insights about the total patient experience in near real time,” says Andrew Kress, senior vice president, IMS Healthcare Value Solutions. “We recognize the increasing interconnectedness of healthcare stakeholders, and the power of applying technology to provide integrated patient-level insights to inform the healthcare quality and value dialogue.”

Available this month, PharMetrics Plus will be a foundational component of IMS’s expanded RWE platform supporting a broad range of applications, from epidemiological studies and comparative effectiveness and safety research, to commercial analytics.

New treatment and outcomes insights will be enabled through a number of unique platform features, including:The industry’s most diverse, integrated health plan database spanning geographies, care settings and subpopulations – along with complete provider details for improved granularity; Patented HIPAA-compliant de-identification and linkage technology to bring together de-identified patient information across IMS and third-party data sets – facilitating deeper insights across the patient journey; The ability to leverage IMS’s extensive technology and services capabilities to enable real-world data management and structured analytics; Flexible information delivery options – single data extracts, full database license agreements or custom solutions.

“We are very pleased to enter this agreement with IMS,” said Swati Abbott, CEO of HIC. “It will accelerate our mission to leverage healthcare informatics to identify and drive gains in efficiencies and effective solutions across the healthcare system.”

Health Intelligence Company is the nation’s premier health intelligence resource, delivering data-driven insights about healthcare trends and best practices, resulting in healthier lives and more affordable access to safe and effective care.