Clinical Trials and Healthcare

QuintilesIMS services the healthcare industry and plans on expanding their reach internationality. Turkey is a country that has experienced changes in recent years. They offer universal healthcare with private health insurance options for individuals. The county is also looking for foreign investors within their healthcare sector, presenting a great opportunity for growth for the company.

Quest Diagnostics is also looking to expand and they offer laboratory services and information for clinical trials. Thanks to deregulation of clinical trials, more clinical trials may be formed without need for extensive research and concise data. Quintiles IMS is a data-driven company that has recently experienced a megamerger and has yet to eliminate or introduce all of their services. Quest Diagnostics has remained fairly stable and could provide options for Turkey faster than QuintilesIMS. However, the company can beat their competition through their data-driven approach.

They have the technological innovation Quest Diagnostics lacks as well as the diversity of services that includes outsourcing that could drive Quest Diagnostics away from investing. The strength of QuintilesIMS lies in data collection, analysis, and assessment. They can provide hospitals and clinics with the information needed to improve patient safety and expand their reach via increased technologies available through the company.

This essay shows how QuintilesIMS fares against its competitors along with the strategy they may have to adapt. A combined strategy approach could prove beneficial to them along with remote services. Data-driven companies are the future of healthcare. QuintilesIMS could just be the best choice for Turkey's healthcare sector.

Introduction

Turkey is a country that offers universal healthcare to its citizens. It is a great place for companies offering services in the healthcare industry to explore and expand. However, there are certain risks that must be identified in order to see if a company should invest and open locations there. One such risk is competition. QuintilesIMS is a recently merged company that specializes in data-driven solutions as well as outsourcing services. They seek to grow their reach internationally. However, competitors may seek to provide such services and push them out of their potential roles. For QuintilesIMS to succeed, they must understand Turkey and what they can offer to their potential clients.

Turkey is a country that is politically unstable, with decreased regulations concerning approval process and clinical trials. However, the government is actively looking for investor for their healthcare sector. This is due to their increased mortality rates and lack of supportive infrastructure. QuintilesIMS may offer the solutions they need along with investment revenue (Onder, 2016).

QuintilesIMS Holdings Inc., otherwise known as QuintilesIMS is an American multinational company helping to serve both clinical research and health information technologies. Recognized as a Fortune 500 business as well as the world's biggest provider of commercial outsourcing services and biopharmaceutical development, it boasts a network of over fifty thousand employees. These employees conduct business in an estimated one hundred countries (QuintilesIMS, 2017). Their revenue as of 2014 is $4.2 billion. They have headquarters in Durham, North Carolina. As well as being the biggest provider, they are also the largest contract research organization, focusing mainly on Phase II-IV clinical trials. Such trials are related with analytical and laboratory services.

The company's history began in 1982 with the founder Dennis Gillings. Gillings incorporated Quintiles Transnational and made it what it is today. In 1990 the company established Quintiles Ireland and Quintiles Pacific Inc. The next year they established Quintiles GmbH in Germany with Atlanta, Georgia service as the base for Quintiles Laboratories Ltd. For $747.5 million, the company purchased Innovex Ltd. Of Britain in 1996. The year after they managed to finish a successful secondary stock offering and went public. How QunitilesIMS acquired its recent name came from the merging with IMS Health that cost $17.6 billion, causing great change in the company in October 2016.

Because of the merging, headquarters are not just in Durham, but also in Danbury, Connecticut. The mega merger might lead to a potential sale that could fall in line with the aim to divest non-core businesses. They may plan to offload their contract sales business, resulting in a deal estimated at $1 billion. The merge, a growing trend within this area of industry, may be an attempt to bulk up market shares as well as differentiate. Although the company is dedicated to data and marketing from the IMS Health portion of the company, there is a desire especially from Quintiles CEO, Aro Bousbib to identify additional cost savings.

Bell Holding is a local company in Turkey that has a long history in business. With over 75 years, they began with investments in Bell Ltd., and grew to encompass nine companies, becoming a multinational business exporting a variety of goods to a multitude of countries in the world. It began with the foundation of Bell Ltd. in 1940 as a soap producer. Then in 1955 the company began producing aluminum slugs and tubes begins. Thirty-five years later in 1990 they founded INTERKAP. INTERKAP produces injection molded plastic caps in a stand-alone specialized structure (BellHolding, 2017).

A year later they began producing plastic bottles through the founding of STAMPA. 2007 brought a partnership with the then Quintiles Inc. Here they founded INNOVEX and entered the field of commercial services and outsourcing. They partnered with another company, English REED Global company and founded REED Consulting. There are other opening of factories including a plastic bottle factory in 2012 and 2013. Their headquarters are in Istanbul, Turkey with the company website providing a company message of honesty and integrity.

Although this company has partnered with Quintiles in the past, it was before the merger. Because of the multiple changes both companies have undergone in the last decade, they may be competitors should QuintilesIMS move ahead with the decision to do business in Turkey. Bell Holdings largely does manufacturing, especially of plastic bottles. However, because of the increasing need for cost savings due to the merger, the company may begin to gain customers looking for outsourcing services, creating competition for Bell Holding. Quest Diagnostics is another Fortune 500 company with international reach and this may spell trouble for QuintilesIMS as they look to open more laboratories and locations across the globe. However, QuintilesIMS seems primed to take on Quest in health information technologies thanks to reported revenues of $1.9 billion during the first quarter of 2017 thanks to research and development solutions (Henderson, 2017).

Strengths and Weaknesses

The competitive advantages of the new QuintilesIMS are many. The first is their ability to generate real commercial value. QuintilesIMS provides customers with consulting services and commercial outsourcing thanks to their highly specialized experts that help manage increasingly complex situations. Through development of clinical development solutions, they can help a company generate a successful product through designing and executing trials to provide understanding of patient outcomes. Furthermore, they help launch excellence via getting the right products to the right patients (QuintilesIMS, 2017).

They offer strategies (brand) meant to optimize product positioning. This includes demonstration of value to stakeholders through pricing and market access. QuintilesIMS offers due diligence throughout a product's lifecycle. The company performs a more precise and accurate evaluation of opportunities and assets they demonstrated themselves through assessment late 2016 and increased reported revenue in early 2017. They understand the need for comprehensive costs, and commercial opportunity breakdown.

Along with assessment and leadership, QuintilesIMS innovates with technology. They orchestrate success thanks to an assortment of cloud-based technology solutions. QuintilesIMS believes technology solutions enable acceleration of business model transformation and competitive differentiation. Thanks to their technological innovations, the company boasts assisting in the creation of thousands of real-world studies, clinical trials, and commercial engagements annually. They help companies and private clients maintain compliance and safety, which is important in the business world.

Their weaknesses exist thanks mainly to their megamerger. Although the megamerger appears profitable, there is the idea that they must adhere to a new structure and new leadership. The new QuintilesIMS CEO, Aro Bousbib is primed to remove unnecessary aspects of the company that are not profitable. Although it is a rumor, the current trend may be to remove certain established services. "Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said that the potential sale falls in line with the company looking to divest some non-core businesses post-merger and that a number of private equity firms are interested in the pickup" (Henderson, 2017).

Selling off certain parts of the company may seem profitable, but could be detrimental in the long run. If one looks at the history of IMS, they became an independent NYSE-listed public company in 1998. IMS extended advisory and consulting services in 2002 through acquiring U.K.-based Cambridge Pharma Consultancy. The direction of the new company, QuintilesIMS, may shift towards consultancy and advisory services. Although Quintiles had established similar services, they did not set out to be a consulting and advisory company.

Mergers can prove successful. However, when companies merge, especially fairly large companies, there are hidden problems that arise from the acquisition. "After the future of the Enron Corporation was discovered to be disastrous the potential business liquidity, and equity they had acquired within other businesses were forced into serious economic and financial conflict" (Reeves, 2012, p. 20). Companies enabling a merge must take into consideration the risks of selling off parts of a company. They must also assess the kind of costs and loss of profit that could accrue should specific processes within the company change. This is a clear disadvantage the company can have.

Their competitor, Quest Diagnostics, serves customers in the healthcare industry. They rely mainly on technology enabling opportunities for growth regarding technological innovation. As more and more clinics and hospitals aim to expand and invest in electronic healthcare systems, they may have the potential to generate more profit as demand for technology driven services increases. This is especially true for countries with lower integration of technology like Turkey.

Furthermore, aside from labs, Quest Diagnostic supports clinical trials, a key aspect of QuintilesIMS. By offering state-of-the-art health information technologies, they can be a direct competitor in Turkey by offering solutions QuintilesIMS may not have at their disposal (Quest Diagnostics, 2017). They have also not had any current mergers, creating stability and overall uniformity within the company.

Although the healthcare industry represents ten percent of global GDP as estimated according to World Bank, Quest Diagnostics operates medical labs, bringing a relatively low quantity of revenue, again ten percent within the sector (Frost & Sullivan, 2017). By specializing in one area, they may easily lose their competitive advantage, especially if a company like QuintilesIMS offers outsourcing services. "Outsourcing is the long-term contracting of a company's business processes to an outside service provider" (Gloor, 2012, p. 46). If hospitals and clinics look to save money and increase profits, they may go to a company like QuintilesIMS that offers outsourcing services instead of the more expensive option, Quest Diagnostics. They must be ready to deliver other services that cannot be easily outsourced to avoid potential setbacks. This is the key potential weakness to examine should QuintilesIMS aim to take a plunge and invest in Turkey.

Competitive Advantage

QuintilesIMS offers customers key insight into outcomes and costs through global real-world data. The data the company can compile and evaluate, allows their customers to create clinical trials and sufficient for studies and other scientific purposes. Unlike Quest Diagnostics, that mainly focus on services within the healthcare industry, QuintilesIMS aims to collect data that allows for creation of compelling value propositions for products and actionable commercial plans. If hospitals and clinics seek to improve the business aspect of their services, they may lean towards data-centric companies like QuintilesIMS.

Furthermore, Quintiles offers customers a chance to avoid penalties and obstacles brought on by non-compliance. Their expertise and analytic approaches assist in all functions such as patient landscapes, brand performance, outcomes research, epidemiology and drug safety, and market access (QuintilesIMS, 2017). They even examine surveys and social media, which Quest Diagnostics cannot. It seems as though they are leaps and bounds ahead of their competitor in relation to real-world insights. This can prove highly profitable for them in the long-run, especially concerning current data-driven trends.

Going back to their key strengths, they can transform clinical development. They do this through expanding the role of genomic data because they believe it allows for maximization of change across the pipeline. They provide customers with patient centric research via ResearchKit which is a way to leverage technology and smart devices to engage patients in registries and clinical trials. The company also monitors data and helps minimize cost and risk, augmenting data quality, enhancing patient safety. Most hospitals and clinics seek to improve patient safety and QuintilesIMS can offer that through their data-driven insight and technology (QuintilesIMS, 2017).