Health & Pharmaceutical Data
Your medical history for sale
Health Data Brokers: Your Medical History for Sale
Perhaps the most disturbing category of data brokerage. These companies collect and sell data about your health conditions, prescriptions, mental health diagnoses, and medical treatments, often without the protections you might assume HIPAA provides. HIPAA only applies to healthcare providers, insurers, and their business associates. It does not cover data brokers who obtain health data through other means.
IQVIA (formerly IMS Health + Quintiles Transnational)
What they are: The largest health data analytics company in the world by market share.[1] Formed from the October 2016 merger of IMS Health and Quintiles Transnational (initially as QuintilesIMS, rebranded IQVIA in November 2017).[2] Publicly traded on the NYSE under ticker IQV. Annual revenue of approximately $16 billion (FY 2025).[1]
What data they have: Access to 1.2 billion unique non-identified patient records globally.[3] IQVIA’s National Prescription Audit covers approximately 93% of outpatient prescription activity in the United States,[4] processing billions of prescription records annually. Records contain year of birth, gender, partial zip code, and prescribing doctor names.[5] IQVIA buys detailed consumer data from Experian and links it with Americans’ health records to deliver marketing insights to drug companies and device makers.[6]
Who buys it: Pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, researchers, and government agencies.
Scandals: A STAT News investigation (July 2022) obtained internal documents showing that IQVIA employees themselves had raised concerns about the adequacy of privacy safeguards surrounding data on more than 120 million people.[6] The FTC sued in July 2023 to block IQVIA’s acquisition of Propel Media (parent company of DeepIntent), arguing that IQVIA’s data vault forms “the substrate of an entire industry focused on showering doctors and patients with marketing messages.” A federal judge granted the preliminary injunction in January 2024, and the deal was abandoned.[7] In August 2025, Senator Maggie Hassan wrote to IQVIA about its practice of hiding data opt-out options from search engines, following an investigation by WIRED.[8]
Legal history: Pre-merger, IMS Health successfully challenged Vermont’s data-mining restrictions in Sorrell v. IMS Health (2011), with the Supreme Court ruling 6–3 that the sale of physician prescribing data is protected commercial speech under the First Amendment — effectively establishing that data brokers have a constitutional right to sell doctor prescribing data.[9]
Datavant
What they are: Operates the largest health data connectivity platform in the United States. Links electronic health records, claims data, pharmacy records, lab results, clinical trial data, and social determinants of health data. Enables more than 60 million healthcare records to move between thousands of organizations, spanning 80,000+ hospitals and clinics and 75% of the 100 largest health systems.[10]
Who buys it: Life sciences companies, pharmaceutical firms, healthcare providers, payers, and government organizations.
Recent expansion: In 2025, Datavant completed three major acquisitions: Aetion (real-world evidence platform), Ontellus (health records retrieval), and DigitalOwl (AI-driven medical data analysis), bringing its ecosystem to over 300 data partners.[10]
HealthVerity
What they are: Connects to what it calls the largest real-world healthcare data ecosystem from 75+ sources.[11] Claims that 80% of the top U.S. pharmaceutical and biotech companies use HealthVerity.[11]
Tempus AI
What they are: Founded in 2015 by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky after his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Publicly traded (NASDAQ: TEM) since its June 14, 2024 IPO, which raised $410.7 million at a $6.1 billion valuation.[12] Built what it calls the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data. Curates and sells de-identified data to pharmaceutical companies for drug discovery across oncology, cardiology, radiology, and depression.[12]
Komodo Health
What they are: Healthcare analytics company founded in 2014. Operates the “Healthcare Map” platform providing longitudinal claims data, patient journey analytics, medication data, specialty pharmaceutical data, EHR data, clinical data, and payer data.[13]
What data they have: The Healthcare Map encompasses 330 million unique patients’ healthcare journeys.[14] 160 million closed, linkable patient lives per year spanning Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial plans.[15] Adds approximately 16 million new clinical encounters daily.[14] 65 billion+ clinical encounters in its dataset.[13]
Who buys it: Pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, payers, and healthcare providers.
Definitive Healthcare
What they are: Healthcare commercial intelligence company (NASDAQ: DH). Provides data on hospitals, physicians, healthcare organizations, all-payor claims data, prescription claims, reference data, social determinants of health (SDOH), and consumer-level data.[16]
What data they have: Analytics on 210 million+ de-identified patients.[17] Data covers 8,800 hospitals and IDNs, 10,000 ambulatory surgery centers, 14,000 imaging centers, 50,000 long-term care facilities, 1,400 ACOs and HIEs, 188,000 physician groups, and 1.6 million physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals. Claims datasets contain billions of de-identified records from commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal programs.[16]
Who buys it: Pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, healthcare IT companies, staffing firms, and consulting firms.
Veradigm (formerly Allscripts)
What they are: Changed name from Allscripts to Veradigm in January 2023.[18] Owns Practice Fusion EHR. Practice Fusion paid a $145 million DOJ settlement in January 2020 — the first-ever criminal action against an EHR vendor — after admitting it solicited kickbacks from a major opioid company in exchange for programming clinical decision support alerts designed to increase prescribing of extended-release opioids.[19] The settlement included over $26 million in criminal fines and a deferred prosecution agreement on two felony anti-kickback statute counts.[19]
Merative (formerly IBM Watson Health, formerly Truven Health Analytics)
What they are: Acquired from IBM by Francisco Partners in a $1 billion deal completed June 30, 2022.[20] Provides healthcare claims data and analytics to healthcare organizations.
Name history: Thomson Reuters Healthcare → Truven Health Analytics → IBM Watson Health → Merative[20]
Veeva Systems
What they are: Cloud-based software and data company serving the life sciences industry. Veeva OpenData provides reference data on healthcare professionals (HCPs) and healthcare organizations (HCOs) including names, addresses, contact information, email, specialty, compliance data, license information, industry identifiers, and affiliations.[21]
What data they have: Approximately 16 million healthcare professional profiles and their affiliated organizations spanning 42 countries. All of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally are customers. Over 1,000 customers globally with a partner ecosystem of 100+ data companies.[21]
Who buys it: Pharmaceutical and biotech companies for sales, marketing, and medical operations.
IQVIA litigation: An eight-year legal battle with IQVIA over alleged trade secret misappropriation and antitrust counterclaims was resolved on August 18, 2025. Neither party paid damages; the companies dismissed all claims with prejudice and entered into long-term clinical and commercial partnerships, though Veeva made a one-time $31 million payment to law firms in connection with the resolution.[22]
Trilliant Health
What they are: Healthcare market intelligence company using all-payer medical and pharmacy claims data. Products include longitudinal patient journey analytics, provider directories, national demand forecasts, health plan price transparency data, and network performance management tools.[23]
What data they have: All-payer claims database covering more than 300 million Americans and approximately 70 billion medical claims (commercial, Medicare Advantage, traditional Medicare, and Medicaid). Provider directory with 9+ million rows of data covering 2.9+ million active physicians. Hospital price transparency dataset containing over 6 billion negotiated rates from more than 5,000 hospitals.[24] Works with 75+ of the top US health systems encompassing 1,500+ hospitals.[23]
Who buys it: Health systems, hospitals, physician groups, and life sciences companies.
Milliman IntelliScript
What they are: Collects and sells prescription drug purchase histories to life insurance companies for underwriting decisions. Aggregates data from pharmacies, health insurance companies, and pharmacy benefit managers across the United States. Provides risk scores quantifying the relative mortality risk of insurance applicants based on their medication history. Operates under the domain rxhistories.com.[25]
Why it matters: The service reveals sensitive health conditions through medication patterns — HIV medications, psychiatric drugs, fertility treatments — which privacy advocates argue constitutes indirect disclosure of medical conditions for commercial purposes. Registered as a Consumer Reporting Agency with the CFPB, meaning consumers can request their report.[26]
Scandals: A FOX 13 investigation titled “Your prescription records for sale” highlighted how Milliman IntelliScript makes detailed prescription histories available to insurers.[27]
The Mental Health Data Market
A Duke University study (February 2023) found that when researchers contacted 37 data brokers about purchasing mental health data, 26 responded and 11 were willing and able to sell it.[28] The 10 most engaged brokers advertised data on people with depression, attention disorder, insomnia, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and PTSD — alongside ethnicity, age, gender, zip code, religion, net worth, credit score, and date of birth. One data broker charged $275 for 5,000 aggregated counts of Americans’ mental health records, while others charged upwards of $75,000 or $100,000 per year for subscription access to individual-level data.[28] Data brokers also openly compile and sell lists categorized by conditions including “Diabetes Interest,” “Cholesterol Focus,” “Smoker in Household,” and lists of people with cancer, HIV/AIDS, and hundreds of other illnesses.