How to manage a primary Healthcare market research project efficiently?

Conducting primary market research especially if you have to collect field data is a challenge. The challenge is putting resources on the ground, getting the right feedback from the targeted audience and ensuring the authenticity of the data.

When starting off a on a primary market intelligence research project it is important to map the cluster into different regions. The mapping will help to identify the required resources to be put on the field. A B2B project has more challenges than a B2C project. If you have the mandate to work on a Healthcare market research and visiting doctors is one of the parameters, then you need to spend a lot of time on each visit and even then not everyone will answer your queries. Similar if you have to visit medicine shops and distributors then not everyone will spend those 2 minutes required to answer those queries. So at the end of the day your target of covering 10 doctors and 8 medical shops may result in much less numbers, effectively increasing the time of the project. Even the best market research companies can sometimes go wrong with these determinants.

The healthcare company that has mandated the research will have different products in their portfolio. You may want to check various factors such as analysis of past performance of products and current trend of these products. There can be different attributes that can be applied such as number of doctors currently prescribing products and number of chemist shop selling the products. For both attributes you may want to do a percentage flooring at 20% i.e. analyze only those products which are prescribed by 20% doctors or has sale at least in 20% chemist shop. There are several such attributes that will need to be set-up in the survey software to get to the real analysis of the data. Some of the best market research companies use tools like Survey Monkey and then do the analysis using tools like R or SAS to arrive at the results.

Another very important aspect is the sample size to determine the correct results from an analysis. A minimum sample size of 125-150 chemist shops across different clusters can help to determine the trend in sales of the company’s products. The prime focus should be to get information on attributes such as, doctors prescribing the product or not, which products doctors are prescribing, sale of products in chemist shops, MRs regularity in chemist shops, discount rate that chemist shops are getting from distributors, chemist shop’s discount percentage to customers, discount rate on competitive products chemist shops are getting, and supply regularity of products. Results that we derive from chemist shops is shown as a sample in the figure below:

                                            Figure 1

Note: The lines in different colors represent different areas from which the primary data is collected.

The representation of data from a primary survey should be very clear and depict information that can yield valuable information. A sample depiction of results is given below:

·         57% chemist shop responded on whether doctors are prescribing the products or not.

·         80% of them said doctors prescribe the company’s medicines but they get very less number of prescriptions which consists of the company’s medicines. Among these 73% chemist shops, general physician practices in 40% chemist shops; consultant physician practices in 8% chemist shops; both general & consultant physician practices in 30% chemist shop; and 44% does not have any doctors.

·         54% chemist shop has sale of the company’s medicines. Among these shops NN% has sale of key products in 66% chemist shops.

·         55% chemist shop shared their perception regarding sales of the company’s product from their store. 45% of them were dissatisfied about the sale of the company’s product and 34% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.

While doing a survey of the doctors, we identified three key determinant factors from Doctor’s Questionnaire which may have impact on doctor’s prescription. These three determinants are:  

·         Product Effectiveness,

·         MR Visit Regularity and

·         MR Product Presentation

The results based upon the analysis are as follows:

·         Indentified factors are not correlated to each other. This implies every factor has independent impact on doctor’s prescription. In another way it can be said that doctors judge these factor independently while they prescribe the company’s product.

·         Above mentioned three factors has positive impact on doctor’s prescription. This implies possibility of writing more products by doctor increases with increasing in any one factor (keeping unchanged other factors) by one unit.

Most important outcome from this analysis is all three factors are statistically significant.

·         This implies doctor prescribes a product depending on effectiveness of the product, how often MRs are visiting them, and how MRs are presenting their product.

·         Furthermore, we got Product Effectiveness appears to be the most important factor in determining doctors’ prescription followed by MR Product presentation and then MR Visit Regularity.

·         This implies doctors consider effectiveness of the product while they prescribe it; after this how well doctors understood about the product from MR has a significant role; and final factor is the visit regularity of the Medical Representatives of respective products.

Overall, a primary Healthcare market research survey should cover all these factors in exceptional details and supported by statistical analysis to arrive at a definitive conclusion on performance of the company.