Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In another study unrelated to physician learning, Venkataraman and Stremersch
(
2007
) constructed measures of treatment effectiveness and side effects based on the
medical literature and information from the FDA drug approval database, then
examined how these two drug attributes would moderate the effect of marketing
efforts on physicians' prescription decisions. Using a physician-level monthly panel
dataset in three therapeutic categories (including statins, gastrointestinal and coagu-
lation drugs, and ED drugs), they found that marketing efforts had a more positive
effect on prescriptions written and samples dispensed by physicians for drugs that
are more effective or with fewer side effects. This fi nding was consistent with the
notion that pharmaceutical companies' marketing efforts can facilitate physicians'
uncertainty reduction in both attributes as shown in Chan et al. (
2013
).
6.4
Conclusions and Future Research
A consensus in the marketing choice literature is that consumers' evaluation of mul-
tiple product attributes explains a substantial part of the variations in brand choices
across consumers. Understanding consumers' preferences over the attributes and
how each individual product performs on these attributes is essential for fi rm's stra-
tegic decision-making. This is also true for the pharmaceutical industry. Treatment
effectiveness and side effects have long been recognized as the two most important
attributes to determine a drug's value. In this chapter, we discuss the importance of
evaluating the impact of treatment effectiveness and side effects on prescription
choices, followed by a summary of research on evaluating these two drug attributes
using both clinical trials data and post-marketing prescription choice data.
There are several directions for the future research. First of all, there have been
very few studies that have measured the impact of treatment effectiveness and side
effects on prescription choices in different empirical contexts. Using a dataset for
life-style drugs (ED drugs), Chan et al. (
2013
) found that side effects had a smaller
impact on prescription choice than treatment effectiveness. It would be interesting
to study life-saving drugs such as cancer or AIDS drugs. Conceptually, the impact
of treatment effectiveness vs. that of side effects in these categories can be vastly
different from the ED category.
Second, as we mentioned in the previous section, treatment outcome measures
may be diffi cult to collect by pharmaceutical companies together with the prescrip-
tion choice data. Recently, electronic medical record (EMR) system has been gain-
ing tractions in the US healthcare industry. EMR tracks individual patients' entire
medical and health history, including both prescription choices and treatment out-
come measures. We believe that this type of data will provide researchers new
opportunities to further study the subjective trade-offs across various treatment
attributes in the real market environment.
Third, in the real market environment, patients may learn about new drugs
through DTC advertising by the pharmaceutical companies, which could lead
patients to request a particular drug. Future research can investigate how much
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