Op-Ed: Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease

NEW YORK, Feb. 9, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The article excerpt below from The New York Times Opinion section, written by David B. Agus, professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California and bestselling author of The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health, expertly highlights the societal benefits of healthcare information. As a leading global information and technology services company providing the healthcare industry with end-to-end solutions to measure and improve its performance and public health overall, IMS Health (NYSE: IMS) supports the ideals espoused in professor Agus' article.

ARTICLE EXCERPT:

How far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.

Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.

Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could "crash" the medical system.

We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus.

To view the entire article as it appears on The New York Times web site click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/sunday/give-up-your-data-to-cure-disease.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

About IMS Health

IMS Health (NYSE: IMS) is a leading global information and technology services company providing clients in the healthcare industry with end-to-end solutions to measure and improve their performance. Our 7,500 services experts connect configurable SaaS applications to 10+ petabytes of complex healthcare data in the IMS One™ cloud platform, delivering unique insights into diseases, treatments, costs and outcomes. The company's 15,000 employees blend global consistency and local market knowledge across 100 countries to help clients run their operations more efficiently. Customers include pharmaceutical, consumer health and medical device manufacturers and distributors, providers, payers, government agencies, policymakers, researchers and the financial community.

As a global leader in protecting individual patient privacy, IMS Health uses anonymous healthcare data to deliver critical, real-world disease and treatment insights. These insights help biotech and pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders to identify unmet treatment needs and understand the effectiveness and value of pharmaceutical products in improving overall health outcomes. Additional information is available at www.imshealth.com.

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SOURCE IMS Health

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