医薬品の普及過程 : 医薬品の採用者間の情報共有におけるMRの役割

抄録

In this paper, we argue that the medical representatives (MRs) play an extreme important role in the medical information diffusion to clinicians. Generally, at the diffusion process of innovations, innovation adopter conducts information gathering (Rogers 2003). As well, in the case of medical diffusion process, the doctors considered as medicine adopters also obtain amount of information from various sources in making decisions to adopt new medicine, which are acquired from academic conferences and seminars, medical journals, word-of-mouth within clinicians, and the information MRs provide. Coleman et al. (1966) showed that the doctors obtained information of new medicine from other doctors who had already used those, which they reduced the uncertainness of new medicine. On the other hand, Van den Bulte and Lilien (2001) reinvestigated the research of Coleman et al. by adding new data, and made conclusion that the marketing effort by medicine companies had more significant impact on medicine diffusion than the internal communication between clinicians. Although the results between Coleman et al. and Van den Butte and Lilien looked like quite different, those two researches will become a complementary relationship if the new viewpoint on MRs' role in the medical diffusionn will be recognized. We conducted a case study of medicine company A, and found that MRs provided doctors with not only drug information but also other clinicians' impressions about new medicine. Clinicians are so busy for daily medical examination and treatment that they cannot have enough time to inquire into and share drug information among other profession. This is why MRs play a significant role as mediators in sharing drug information between doctors.