[Update: 6:35 am PT, 4/25] IMS Health, the giant healthcare market information company based in Danbury, CT, said today it is acquiring San Francisco-based DecisionView for an undisclosed amount.
DecisionView, a privately-held software company founded in 2004, has made strides the past few years with its real-time analytic programs that are supposed to help drug companies analyze and speed up patient enrollment in clinical trials. DecisionView, which I profiled in these pages last month, has persuaded eight of the world’s top 10 pharma companies to use its product, revenues have almost tripled since 2010, and the company expects to break even this year, according to CEO Linda Drumright. The company has about 40 employees. Granite Ventures and Aeris Capital are among the investors who backed the company.
IMS Health says it plans to package DecisionView’s offerings into its Healthcare Value Solutions business, which it says is currently focused on helping companies track “health economics and outcomes research, government solutions, payer and provider solutions and clinical trial optimization services.”
“Today, the clinical trial planning and enrollment process is inefficient due to the lack of real-world data and analytics in trials management and decision making,” said Andrew Kress, senior vice president of IMS Healthcare Value Solutions, in a statement. “Approximately 90 percent of clinical trials don’t finish on time, with trial enrollment cited as the leading cause of the delays. Through this acquisition, we will enhance clinical trial productivity – transforming the way patient studies are planned and executed.”
[Updated comment from DecisionView CEO Linda Drumright.]
“IMS is the industry’s leading provider of information, services and technology helping customers to better understand the performance and value of medicines and is currently making investments in bringing that value into the R&D space,” Drumright says. “The combination of the two allows us to expand data-driven decisions across a broader scope of critical clinical processes to deliver even more strategic value to our clients.
Of course, investors are always delighted by a nice return on their investment and our employees get the benefit of growing their careers in the context of a larger organization while continuing to foster the innovative, nimble, can-do culture that our customers appreciate so much when working with us. Leveraging the wealth of IMS presents opportunities to go faster on not only the DecisionView vision but the new and expanding vision that is now possible as a part of IMS.”
