This company just had it’s IPO and became public not too long ago and as you can read they hold data on 85% of the world’s prescriptions which means of course they sell a lot of data too.

When you look at the IMS executives, very little in clinical backgrounds compared to capital and other related backgrounds. The last couple of years they have bought up other companies to include a CRM company and software as a service and social network analytics company to engage consumers. IMS Health sells data and reports to all the top 100 worldwide global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as consulting firms, advertising agencies, government bodies and financial firms. IMS said it processes data from more 45 billion healthcare transactions annually (more than six for each human on earth on average) and collects information from more than 780,000 different streams of data worldwide.

In addition they company has approximately 400 million comprehensive, longitudinal, anonymous patient records and the main geographic area for storage is located in New Jersey. Now that such companies are growing by leaps and bounds, we really need laws to license all of them so we know who they are and what kind of data they sell and to who, as there’s no transparency here at all. When your data becomes flawed and you have to do all the legwork to fix it while big corporations make billions selling you data, it would be nice to have “some” reference for consumers and that would be establishing a license as it’s like the wild west out there.

Having all this data leads to one other side effect other than research and that’s money, big money and much of time when data is sold, you get scored on something. This is out of hand in the US as it’s all about money and not making you healthier. We have watched that over the last few years and companies are getting richer under “scoring” and sometimes used flawed data to score and evaluate you. Insurers love that portion of their business intelligence with their risk assessments.

What we are asking for a consumers as a trail to search back and find who’s selling our data and what kind is not unreasonable but until there are laws nobody will do a thing. So here this data and let’s say an insurer queries it with your Visa and MasterCard data that they buy?

Now after reading this does anyone wonder why inequality is now growing at an accelerated pace? The wealthy don’t have to deal with this so they are pretty much untouched. The US spends more on “healthcare and data selling” than any other country and I think data selling is getting healthier as we can’t say the same for us.

This is the reality for the rest of us, run and hide as anyone can take data and analytics and create any kind of story they want with any type of context and we all know that so again as these big data warehouses get bigger and bigger something better be done to regulate. In 60 Minutes story on data sellers the FTC just sat up and said “we’ve lost control” so how does that make you feel, probably not too good.

Cegedim is a global technology and services company specializing in healthcare. The proposed transaction includes Cegedim’s CRM solutions that help life sciences clients in 80 countries drive sales effectiveness, optimize marketing programs across multiple channels and mitigate regulatory compliance risks; OneKey Reference Database that provides insights on 13.7 million healthcare professionals across the globe; and information solutions that use primary market research. In 2013, these businesses collectively generated revenue of €424 million (approximately $573 million) and adjusted EBITDA of €64 million (approximately $86 million). The acquired businesses will bring to IMS Health a team of more than 4,500 talented professionals with deep information and technology skills in areas that include software development, data warehousing, mobile applications and business intelligence tools, as well as analytics and implementation services.

IMS Health expects to finance this acquisition through a mix of cash on hand and existing credit facilities, with no material impact on its leverage ratio.

Dark Arts of Mathemical Deception

Professor Charlie Siefe of NYU, a mathematician debunks clinical trials, and few other items to where data is spun and fools you, every day example, hear about the perfect butt algorithm and more. These are probably some things you have never thought about but again after listening to what he has to say, it’s time to think about being skeptical. Here’s a radio show that also talks about the same topics.

This video digs in a bit further with how fictitious business models are used by banks and companies do this too. The models are so complex that CEOs don’t even understand them. “Quants, The Alchemists of Wall Street will take you through how “math models” work at banks and financial institutions in a way that even the layman can understand. More videos like over at theAlgo Duping/Killer Algorithm Page. Bank of America will also tell you“IT’ is a business” how they make money.

Weapons of Math Destruction

This is a lecture where Kathy O’Neill, a former Quant who worked for a Hedge Fund (Weapons of Math Destruction) on Wall Street will tell you what is done with your retirement money and more. The banks and companies use technology to take advantage because they can. “Of course we are going to take advantage because our tools are our brains…if they could figure out a way to take advantage of pension funds they would, a good interview with explaining smart money and dumb money.

Algorithms Shape The World

This is a very good presentation done a TED Conference and really was the one that got everyone started thinking about algorithms and today it’s talked about a lot. As he says “if you’re an algorithm, life is looking pretty good, but can’t say the same for humans”. What is a black box? Nobody has any control over the flash crash. We have moved forward a bit but still we are writing the unreadable and lost the sense of some of what is happening. Nice plug for Nanex here with research.