One of the most important skills pharmaceutical marketing and marketing research practitioners must develop is a thorough understanding of how doctors use information to make decisions. This information provides a window into the mind of the physician and specific guidance as to the task that must be accomplished in selling a drug. This month’s published document for The Orange Pages examines how the treatment decision process actually works and the most commonly held misconceptions about the process.
The most common error pharmaceutical marketers and marketing researchers make is to assume that physicians spend far more time and energy making prescribing decisions than they actually do. In reality, the average physician tends to makes prescribing decisions by developing habits that involve the use of only a relatively few drugs and sticking with these habits for the vast majority of cases in a given treatment area.
While these doctors, referred to as “levelers” because of their one-size-fits-all mentality, are the norm, variations in prescribing style were discovered in the early 1990s when Medical Marketing Group Inc. introduced Individual Physician Level Prescribing Data and had the opportunity to view actual prescribing behavior for the first time. Based on different physician prescribing segments, it was discovered that some doctors, called “spreaders,” use a wide variety of drugs in a particular drug class/treatment area to get maximum supplies and use of samples, etc. Finally, while “matchers” also use a wide variety of drugs in a treatment class, they are well aware of the nuances of difference among products and purposefully match these nuances with the presenting profile of a particular patient.
Although Medical Marketing Group’s analyses were popular in the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry now largely ignores, or is unaware of, the ability to analyze physician segments based on prescribing behavior profiles and the importance that using this information can have in marketing efforts.
The most basic, and perhaps most actionable, way in which to segment physicians is by their decision styles. Frequently required to make life and death decisions, balancing out the desire to do as much as possible to help a patient without doing unnecessary harm, a physician would be paralyzed without a decision-making style on which he or she could depend.
At the most basic level of segmentation, physicians represent one of three decision styles, which can be arrayed on a dimension we refer to as “intellectual involvement in the practice of medicine.” These include:
- Scientists – These doctors are interested in the science of how things work, and they pride themselves on making their own decisions and doing so based on a thorough review of all relevant information.
- Modernists – These doctors are unable or unwilling to spend the time necessary to make their prescribing and other treatment decisions based on their own thorough review of available data; they carefully observe what colleagues they respect are doing and do likewise.
- Traditionalists – These doctors take the perspective that if a treatment approach was successful and safe yesterday, it’s likely to be a reasonable approach today as well.
What is the benefit of understanding these decision styles and how to recognize which style characterizes an individual physician? Physician decision style is, if one thinks about it correctly, the mental filter that underlies prescribing style. For example, a matcher would likely be a scientist since, as has already been noted, such an approach to prescribing requires a much more thorough and specific knowledge of similarities and differences among products than do the other approaches. Levelers or product loyalists, on the other hand, could be classified as either Modernists, if they are employing the drug that most of their colleagues are employing, or Traditionalists, if they prescribe mainly a drug they have prescribed for years.
To download the complete July 2008 discussion on doctor decision making, please click here.
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