Italian privacy regulator fines IQVIA €7 million, rejecting its claim that data on one million patients were anonymized

Italy’s data protection authority, Garante, fined IQVIA Solutions Italy €7 million, finding that it unlawfully processed the health data of about 1 million patients. The decision was issued on September 23, 2026, and published on October 2. It found that patient codes in continued use could be used to trace medical histories and that IQVIA was a controller from the data collection stage, so it could not claim exemption as a recipient of anonymized data.