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IMS Completes Prescription Data Upgrade
IMS Health has announced the full deployment of 'Next-Generation Prescription Services™', a large-scale enhancement to its core prescription offerings in the US. Improvements include more timely delivery and better coverage of prescriptions by specialists.
The move makes the company's industry-standard information services – IMS National Prescription Audit™, Xponent® and PlanTrak™ – significantly more powerful in studying the use and effectiveness of pharmaceutical products.
The service is part of the New Models, New Metrics global program and gives precise product-level information on all pharmaceutical products, revealing US prescription trends. One trend highlighted by such data is the growth of products used mostly by specialists as opposed to primary care physicians – from 32% of all US prescription sales in 2001 to 43% in 2006 – and the firm says coverage of these has been enhanced. Pam Sauerwald, VP Portfolio Optimization, IMS Americas, lists the rise of specialty pharmaceuticals, managed care, generics and non-traditional distribution channels as key trends reshaping the US healthcare landscape, and describes the new service as 'a game-changing initiative that sets a new standard of market measurement, enabling clients to more readily address both subtle and large-scale market changes.'
Existing IMS prescription offerings also gain from the addition of new data elements such as patient age and gender; the integration of longitudinal metrics such as national patient counts and switching behavior; enhanced projections covering long-term care; and weekly delivery of all prescription measures across Marketing and Sales applications. In addition, the firm says the current advances set the stage for further improvements, including further integration of core prescription information with its anonymized patient-level offerings.
IMS is online at www.imshealth.com .
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