A number of recent reports have been published about doctors’ use of the Internet, and the evolution of Internet research in pharmaceuticals. This article draws together some key findings and sets them within the context of the past 10 years.
Peter Winters 
18 Dec, 2006
Adoption of the Internet by GPs, 1996-2006 and evolution in the use of Internet Research to survey doctors
Internet Adoption by GPs
The EphMRA Foundation has recently released a report, conducted by Medimix, about Internet Usage amongst doctors in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK – and they have kindly given me permission to reproduce some headline figures about the usage of the Internet by GPs for this article. If you are an EphMRA member, you can download the full report from the EphMRA site. Albeit based on a modest sample size of 40 per country, we can see that the Internet is nearly universally used by GPs in these countries, although some have still resisted this technology in France and Italy where the adoption level was measured at 85% and 80% respectively. This report prompted me to write this article about how these penetration levels have been reached. (This is from information I am aware of, and I would be grateful if anyone else has information that could be added to this picture.)
At the tail-end of 1995, I remember reading an article by Peter Llewlyn, in Pharmaceutical Times, where he asked if anyone had information on the proportion of GPs using the Internet. Since I was running the Isis Research International Medical Omnibus at the time, I decided to include a couple of questions on our next GP Omnibus, which were:
Q1 – Do you ever personally use the internet? I am talking about any internet any internet service including e-mail and the World Wide Web?
If they did not:
Q2 – How likely do you think you are to use the internet with the next 12 months?
The figures reproduced in this chart have been reproduced with the kind permission of Synovate Healthcare, P\S\L Research and the EphMRA Foundation.
Download this chart in Powerpoint format or as a JPEG image.
As you can see from the chart, the levels in 1996 were very low, and did not change much by 1997 – although in the second wave I did include the US which showed that almost half of US PCPs (46%) were then using the Internet at that time. By 1998, European adoption was starting to move considerably, although we could start to see interesting differences by market. In the UK and Spain we saw quicker take-up of the Internet than in the other markets, and in France, Germany and Italy we could start to see that some of the older doctors were very resistant to adopting the Internet. It appears that there are still a minority of 10/15% of GPs could still be “Internet-phobes” in France and Italy – and my guess is that these mostly an older generation of doctors who will retire in the next few years.
The results for 1996, 1997 and 1998 were reported on within Pharmaceutical Times, and also at a conference on “Marketing Pharmaceuticals over the Internet” by Vision in Business, in March 1998, Amsterdam.
In 2000, we could see that the majority of GPs in all countries were using the Internet – but there were an interesting nominal drop in Internet usage from 2000 to 2001 in the UK data (from 82% to 76%). Whilst this is not a statistically significant difference, it still looked odd. Further investigation showed that the UK phone sample collected for the 2001 survey was heavily skewed towards older physicians – a group less likely to use the Internet. My general conclusion/hypothesis was that, at this point of the adoption curve of the Internet, younger physicians were increasingly preferring to complete surveys via the Internet and less willing to complete surveys by phone – and hence the phone survey under-represented the overall adoption of the Internet by GPs.
This point leads me to make one comment about some of the results shown in the EphMRA Foundation Project 2006 about Internet Access Amongst Physicians. The data which describes how much doctors use the various methodologies – such online surveys, phone research and so on1 - is going to be biased in favour of the methodology of the survey where the data was collected. One reason for this is that not all doctors (who agree to do research) will be equally willing to participate in each research methodology and hence, for example, those who complete a phone survey will under-represent the market usage of online surveys, and visa versa. Also, I believe, there is a natural affinity to think more favourably of the survey methodology in which you are currently participating. The EphMRA Foundation study 2001, Verification of the Internet as a Research Tool, a parallel study of Internet versus phone, shows further details on how different this kind of data can be according to which data collection methodology is used - see slides 69 to 72.
Notwithstanding the above comment, I did find the EphMRA Foundation Project 2006 very useful, and glad they had done the study!
Evolution of Internet Research amongst doctors
There are a number of recent studies available to show how Internet Research has become the dominant quantitative research methodology. Medefield are running a Pharmaceutical Market Research Trends tracking survey with the 2006 wave, released on 28 November 2006, asserting that “43% of all quantitative pharmaceutical research is conducted online” (page 1), a proportion which has doubled over the last couple of years. In the consumer world, the 2006 report of the Research Industry Trends Survey, reveals that “the Internet has officially supplanted CATI as the most prevalent quantitative data collection methodology” (page 14). If you want to keep informed about how the online research is being done, ConfirmIt provide a useful tracking survey, and the 2006 MR software survey report has also become available for download within the last month.
How different it is from a decade ago; there were then quite a number of researchers who were sceptical about what Internet research could offer. For example, one quote that seemed to catch people’s attention at the time, was one shown below from Jeremy Wyndham of PAS as published in the Market Research Society’s Research magazine 10 years ago:
“Internet users prefer to sit at home and converse electronically with other individuals in Cyberspace, rather than hold normal conversation with fellow members of the human race” —Jeremy Wyndham, PAS, May 1996
Whilst there may have been some truth in this assertion at that time, it could hardly be described as a forward-looking opinion. Research agencies that have ignored Internet research in the past decade will likely have faced business challenges (unfortunately, as far as I can tell, PAS is no longer around to give their current perspective on this).
Forward-Looking
The latest Medefield survey report provides an admirable level of detail about how much Internet research is being used, what is driving the growth of Internet research and what is going to happen next.
One area of the report that I would like to see greater depth of analysis is with respect to what is driving Internet Research usage. The Medefield report claims that (page 2) “worldwide, respondents who use the Internet for market research purposes cited four top reasons:
Conducting market research online is time-efficient
Conducting market research online is cost-effective
Conducting market research online is convenient for respondents
Accessibility to respondents regardless of where they are or what time it is”.
What crosses my mind is to wonder if there are different segments of respondents that have different clusters of needs. Could these reasons be further defined into more sophisticated business needs? How will these reasons change as the technology develops in the manner the Medefield report discusses in its final section?
I write this as someone who uses Medefield’s services and, although not a target respondent for their survey, would not include any of these four reasons within my “top four”. My “top four” would be:
Firstly, as we argued in at “Going Beyond Research As We Know It” paper at EphMRA paper earlier this year (see slides 30 and 53 in particular), Internet Research allows a much better communication with respondents.
Secondly, Internet Research offers the opportunity for real-time business information to be generated from surveys. Nadhim Zahawi, the co-founder of online agency YouGov, will surely be proved correct when he writes that "Technology has transformed our industry. Our vision is that primary data will be available like prices on a Bloomberg screen."
Thirdly, Internet research allows surveys to be conducted amongst groups that were really not feasible before – such as employees, peers and clients. The Medefield survey is, itself, an example of this.
Fourthly, and this is looking a little to the future, Internet surveys are broadly “carbon-neutral”. More of the Internet surveys that I am involved in are competitive to face-to-face surveys, which would require a fair amount of travel. As companies such as GSK sign up to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), it will be a point of differentiation for agencies to offer Internet surveys which claim zero/low emissions. More and more products can be developed virtually, and tested via Internet research, perhaps using video streaming technology. It is my guess that we will all become much more familiar with how much carbon we are spending, especially if the ETS facilitates individual carbon trading.
Otherwise, I particularly liked the end section which considers “What Next?”, how research may develop in the future given changes in the way that people are interacting via the Internet. The Medefield report discusses possible market research applications as being “real-time feeds on market research results, using physician blogs as a form of narrative research, using podcasting to conduct to conducting global market research, and more” (page 5). I think this is correct and is all part of a more general, interactive shift in the way the Internet is used under the rubric of Web 2.0. It could also lead to more hybrid methodologies (as has been noted in the Research Industry Trends Survey, page 15) and, at last, the development of credible qualitative approaches that are conducted online.
1See slide 19 of country reports, “Internet Access Amongst Physicians”, EphMRA Foundation Project 2006 run by Medimix,
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