Determinants of pharmaceutical innovation diffusion: social contagion and prescribing characteristics

Ágnes Lublóy, Judit Lilla Keresztúri and Gábor Benedek

Corvinus Economics Working Papers (CEWP) from Corvinus University of Budapest

Abstract: This article studies the determinants of pharmaceutical innovation diffusion among specialists. To this end, it investigates the influences of six categories of factors—social embeddedness, socio-demography, scientific orientation, prescribing patterns, practice characteristics, and patient panel composition—on the use of new drugs for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus in Hungary. Here, in line with international trends, 11 brands were introduced between April 2008 and April 2010, outperforming all other therapeutic classes. The Cox proportional hazards model identifies three determinants—social contagion (in the social embeddedness category) and prescribing portfolio and insulin prescribing ratio (in the prescribing pattern category). First, social contagion has a positive effect among geographically close colleagues—the higher the adoption ratio, the higher the likelihood of early adoption—but no influence among former classmates and scientific collaborators. Second, the wider the prescribing portfolio, the earlier the new drug uptake. Third, the lower the insulin prescribing ratio, the earlier the new drug uptake—physicians’ therapeutic convictions and patients’ socioeconomic statuses act as underlying influencers. However, this finding does not extend to opinion-leading physicians such as scientific leaders and hospital department and outpatient center managers. This article concludes by arguing that healthcare policy strategists and pharmaceutical companies may rely exclusively on practice location and prescription data to perfect interventions and optimize budgets.

Keywords: Cox proportional hazards model; diffusion; pharmaceutical innovations; prescribing characteristics; social contagion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 I19 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://unipub.lib.uni-corvinus.hu/1727/ original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cvh:coecwp:2014/17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Corvinus Economics Working Papers (CEWP) from Corvinus University of Budapest 1093 Budapest, Fõvám tér 8.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adam Hoffmann ().