Role of Medical Representatives in Influencing Medicine Prescription Behaviour of Doctors

Medicine Prescription Behaviour (MPB) is a doctor’s decision for a specific drug/medicine of a pharmaceutical company. Doctors consider several factors in their evaluation process while selecting a particular drug. The transfer of information to doctors, especially through detailing by Medical Representatives (MRs), is a crucial element of pharmaceutical marketing. New drugs are introduced in the market very frequently because of rapid change in preferences and prescription patterns of doctors. Therefore, understanding shift in doctors’ desires regarding selection of a particular drug give opportunities to proactive pharmaceutical companies to increase their market share by timely anticipating doctors' preferences. This paper seeks to identify the influence of level of knowledge, kind of information, communication skills and frequent visit of MRs on three aspects of MPB; early prescription of new drugs, cost of drugs and habitual aspect. Testable hypotheses were developed with respect to MPB and a survey questionnaire was designed to capture data from 150 doctors practicing in Delhi. The hypotheses were tested using Multiple Regression and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The study concluded that the knowledge, kind of information, communication skills and professionalism factor of MRs influence doctors towards early prescription of new drugs and their habitual behaviour towards prescription of drugs. The study concluded that knowledge and the kind of information given by MRs are significant predictors of cost aspect of MPB of doctors.