IQVIA: A Leading Digital Healthcare Stock

Data is the new oil. It’s a phrase that regular readers will recognize, but we can’t take credit for coining it. The credit actually goes to a British data scientist named Clive Humby. Of course, it took a marketing guy to point out that raw oil must be turned into a product like gas or plastic to have real value. Similarly, data must be refined – structured and analyzed – to be valuable. While some have argued that the oil-data analogy is imperfect at best – oil is finite, while data is not, for example – it’s still a useful way of thinking about how big data fuels different types of business analytics. To really stretch the metaphor, let’s talk about IQVIA (IQV), which is probably the world’s largest supplier and refinery of healthcare data to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.

A Leading Digital Healthcare Stock

IQVIA is the result of a 2016 merger between Quintiles, a contract research organization, and IMS Health, a healthcare data and analytics provider. We briefly profiled the Durham, North Carolina-based company last month while reviewing a new digital health ETF from notable emerging tech investor Lux Capital. IQVIA is now the largest holding in First Trust Nasdaq Lux Digital Health Solutions ETF (EKG), sporting a market cap of about $40 billion