Diffusion of Innovation in Healthcare; the evidence

When I talk with people about the New Pharmaceutical Marketing and how it's based on Diffusion of Innovation, they say "Hey, makes sense. Like it." It explains a lot of the problems that old pharma marketing couldn't tackle and gives us a way to attack many of the new ones.

My suspicion however, is that they may subconsciously think "But is this really totally proven, or is it a marketing fad? I mean, every one else is still doing it the old way."

"Diffusion of Innovation" sounds sexy, but it’s no passing fad. It is based on years of work around the laws of adoption of innovation, on the concepts laid out in Everett Rogers seminal book The Diffusion of Innovations.

While there is new thinking in today’s frameworks, the reality is that the enormous evidence base behind the ideas that we discuss is actually very well established. And, though it’s sometimes overlooked, a vast amount of the work we cite and build upon was conducted in medicine, in healthcare.

The study that really kicked off all studies in this area was the Columbia Drug Study, published in 1954 (it followed the introduction of tetracyclin, ad from the time pictured above). The study confirmed all that had come before in other fields (about the adoption of innovation as a curve) was happening in the medical field too. And, importantly it opened up the concepts of opinion leadership and two-step flow theory (which describes word of mouth in action)

Since that study, others have repeated, verified and built on the same framework. The growth of interest and research in the field has been vast. In fact, the growth has been exponential – from 500 studies in the whole of the 1980s to more than 1,000 cited every year on PubMed (see graph below).

Healthcare Diffusion of Innovation Papers published by year
(source Pubmed)

It’s amusing to watch peoples’ reactions as they realise that this theory is so much more than common sense, that it is a well-researched description of the field they work in. It’s like they’ve just been given the best market research going.

Perhaps it’s years of searching for the one “magic bullet” that has conditioned all ears in the industry to be sceptical of ideas that sound vaguely bullet-like. Once people begin to trust the foundation we’re working off, the strategic possibilities begin to explode.

We’ve been writing again, and have put together an article on this history and its implications in more depth.

Click here if you’d like to read it.