Few doubt that the Internet will make a major impact in the way medicine is practiced. Also, no one can say for sure what that impact will be.
What other opportunities/threats will the Internet present pharmaceutical companies? Particularly in the last year, most pharmaceutical companies have developed eTeams dedicated to understanding these issues and recommending business strategies. Yet there is varied and often conflicting sources of information available to these teams.
As a healthcare medical market research agency, P\S\L Research has mirrored this need by creating eResearch Practices in North America and Europe.
These eResearch Practices have been built on firm foundations. P\S\L has been active on the Internet since 1994 and is therefore poised to help its clients better understand and harness the "transformative" forces inherent in the Internet. Specifically the first-hand Internet expertise garnered with developing its NuEdge and NuMedia services will help clients in Europe, North and South America as well as Asia be leaders rather than laggards in leveraging the Internet to transform the way pharmaceuticals will be marketed in the emerging eHealth world.
I.MD 2000
The most recent multi-client initiative of these eResearch Practices is I.MD 2000.
I.MD 2000 will provide a detailed, global perspective of usage and attitudes towards the Internet by Primary Care Physicians. The study, conducted by phone and via the Internet will be run on a regular basis and, for the first wave, has been conducted in Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain & the UK), North America (Canada, USA) and South America (Brazil).
I.MD 2000 considers the following subject areas:
The Physician-Pharmaceutical Company Relationship and the InternetThe first wave of I.MD 2000 will be available on 31 May 2000.
Subsequent waves of I.MD 2000 will track key parameters of the impact of the Internet on the practice of medicine as well as provide in-depth look at new issues and developments as they occur (e.g. the adoption of wireless communication by physicians and patients, electronic patient records etc.).
I.MD 2000 may be purchased in its entirety or on a modular or country basis - with consultancy support as required.
Contact Jennifer Brown, eResearch North America or Peter Winters, eResearch Europe for more information about I.MD 2000.
Global Franchise Leadership Study
For more information on this newly added P\S\L Research Study click here.
Global Survey Points To Increasing Use of Internet By Physicians
Contact Jennifer Brown with press credentials for executive summary .
MONTREAL -- September 8, 1998 (Xpress Press)-- A recently conducted study on physicians' Internet usage documents the pervasive and growing use of the Internet by doctors around the world. This trend is altering, and will continue to alter, the face of communications aimed at medical audiences and the ways in which physicians communicate with their colleagues and patients.
Key Findings
The first phase of a two-phase study found that 80 percent of physicians across eleven North American, European, and Asian countries own a computer and 44 percent of these physicians have accessed the Internet. The predominant place of Internet access is in the home.
Among physicians who have not yet accessed the Internet (56 percent of physicians in the eleven countries surveyed), two-thirds intend to do so soon.
The overall result is that more than 80 percent of physicians are on-line or intend to be on-line in the near future.
The second phase of the study was conducted with over 2,500 Internet- connected physicians in 105 countries. Excluding all time spent on e-mail, these doctors reported spending half of their Internet time seeking information pertaining to medicine. Almost all (95 percent) said they use the Internet to access disease information, 88 percent reported reading medical journals on-line, and 86 percent said they use the Internet to obtain drug information.
The medical journal reported to be accessed most frequently on-line by these Internet-connected physicians was The New England Journal of Medicine (33 percent of physicians), The Lancet and British Medical Journal (both by 23 percent) and Journal of the American Medical Association by 19 percent of physicians.
Academic and independent scientific sources are not the only ones accessed. Over three-fifths or 63 percent of the Internet-connected physicians reported having visited the web site of at least one pharmaceutical company. When visiting these sites, the information physicians stated they most wanted to see was "product information" (51 percent), "R&D information" (27 percent), and "disease information" (16 percent).
In a finding that is both surprising and indicative of the general trend toward patient empowerment, 62 percent of net-connected physicians reported suggesting to some of their patients that they, the patients, could obtain medical information via the net and almost one-third of physicians reported that patients had brought to them medical or health-related information they had found on the Internet.
These findings strongly suggest that physicians may soon be obtaining on-line a significant portion of the information they utilise to practice medicine and that as patients become ever-better informed, the demands placed upon physicians to stay abreast of medical news will grow.
Research Methodology
This study was carried out in two phases. Phase I consisted of telephone interviews conducted with 1,103 randomly selected primary care physicians in 11countries. Questionnaires were administered in the Spring of 1998 by ten independent research agencies, all members of The Healthcare Research Partners network. The research firms involved included Delta Marketing Research (Spain), IBS Research & Consultancy (Turkey), IHA-GfM (Switzerland), IPM (Netherlands), Martin Hamblin (UK), Medi-Mark Ltd. (Greece), Navigare Medical Marketing Research AB (Sweden), P\S\L Research (Canada, USA), Pysma International (Germany), and TM Marketing Inc. (Japan).
Phase II of the study was conducted via the Internet with 2,532 primary care and specialist physicians in 105 countries. All facets of this phase were carried out using the global Internet research facilities of P\S\L Research.
About Healthcare Research Partners (HRP)
The Healthcare Research Partners network is an international group of independent agencies specialising in healthcare communications and marketing research. Founded in 1996 and with member agencies in Asia, Europe and North America, the growing HRP network is dedicated to combining the national expertise of its members to provide quality healthcare research and consultancy world-wide.
About P\S\L Research
P\S\L Research is a division of the P\S\L Consulting Group, an organisation dedicated to helping its clients succeed by helping them better understand and better communicate with the healthcare professionals who use or prescribe their products as well as with the patients who directly benefit from them. First established in 1976, the group has practices in London, Montréal, New York, Paris, and Toronto. Innovation-driven from its inception, P\S\L's R&D efforts have resulted in the development and introduction over the past 5 years of Internet-based medical information facilities now used, every week, by hundreds of thousands of physicians and patients from more than 100 countries. Armed with these facilities along with the recognised expertise of its multi-national staff and the strength of its international alliances, P\S\L has truly become a world leader in global medical communications and global healthcare research.
Contact Information
For more information about the study, or to receive an executive summary,
please contact:
Jennifer Brown
President, Research Division
P\S\L Global Communications Research
1250, boul René Lévesque O.
Montréal, Canada
H3B 4W8
(Tel) 514-938-2602 (Fax) 514-938-2626
This page was last modified on October 17, 2000.
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P\S\L Research - Monitoring the International Impact of the Internet on Medical Practice