IQVIA Inc. and IQVIA AG (together, IQVIA) have sued MedImpact Healthcare Systems Inc., the General Manager of MedImpact Arabia, and MedImpact International Hong Kong Ltd. (collectively, MedImpact) over a partnership gone awry, according to a partly redacted Central District of California complaint filed on Monday.
The plaintiffs, acquired by non-party Dimensions Healthcare LLC of the United Arab Emirates in 2016, say that the defendants surreptitiously leveraged the joint venture to steal pharmacy benefits management (PBM) trade secrets in order to “leapfrog” MedImpact U.S.’s own PBM software offering.
The filing explains that IQVIA “directly and through various subsidiaries around the world, provides, among other things, market research, analytics, technology and services to the life sciences, medical device, and diagnostics and healthcare industries, to clients in over 100 countries.” Importantly, MedImpact also offers PBM software, the complaint says.
MedImpact allegedly stole the plaintiffs’ “drug-to-diagnosis indication and contraindication edits.” These edits allegedly provide a rejection alert when a patient seeks to fill a medication prescription that is not used to treat that patient’s medical diagnosis, or when a patient seeks to fill a prescription that may result in an adverse reaction, due, for example, to the comingling of medications or allergies.
IQVIA’s “drug-to-diagnosis indication and contraindication edits trade secrets are comprised of the custom logic and methods behind building and maintaining the logic that links between content and relational lists connecting drugs to diagnoses and conditions, including how an edit adjudicating engine works and the populated content within it, and validation of the edits,” the filing explains.
Purportedly, the defendants stole the trade secret information via electronic means, and primarily email when the parties were engaged in the joint venture centered in the Middle East. “Rather than invest the necessary resources, including time, talent, and money, to independently develop the requisite expertise to provide drug-to-diagnosis indication and contraindication edits, MedImpact decided to take a shortcut and steal the trade secrets instead,” the complaint says.
Now, IQVIA seeks to hold MedImpact accountable under state and federal trade secrets misappropriation laws and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and against the individual defendant for breach of the duty of loyalty and civil conspiracy. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction barring the defendants from further using the plaintiffs’ trade secrets, damages including compensatory, punitive, and exemplary, as well as an award of their attorneys’ fees and costs.
The plaintiffs are represented by Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP.
