Quintiles to access patient data for Phase IV studies through IMS Health deal
Under the terms of the deal, the contract research organisation (CRO) will have access to IMS Health’s real-world evidence (RWE) information platforms, containing over 500 million patient records for carrying out Phase IV post-approval studies.
In return, Quintiles will provide IMS with its real-world and late-phase data going back to 2011, which totals over 650,000 enrolled patients.
“All of the patient data that is part of this alliance will be de-identified of course,” Quintiles spokesperson Phil Bridges told Outsourcing-Pharma.com. “While the patient identity is anonymous, you can use that body of de-identified data to better understand patients' consumption of healthcare services, and the physicians or providers that are treating them and how to best engage them in research projects.”
Furthermore, the outreach to these patients would come through physicians and not directly from Quintiles or IMS, he added, “but engaging those physicians to have a conversation with the patient, for instance, to see if they would be interested in consenting to participate in a research study.
Phase IV demand
Recently the firm spoke to this publication about the rise in demand from biopharma firms for Phase IV post-approval trials, driven by both regulators and patients themselves. “This part of the clinical research cycle has definitely expanded in the past 10-15 years,” Zia Haque, Senior Director of Data Management of the CRO said.
Quintiles was named last month as the market leader in Phase IV studies according to the 2015 CRO Quality Benchmarking – Phase IV Service Providers Report from Industry Standard Research (ISR).
But Bridges did not divulge when asked how important this Phase of trials was for Quintiles as a business.
“As a public company we don't typically discuss market opportunity or drill down to specific market segments such as percentages of our work by phases.”
