Factors Influencing the Prescribing Behavior of Medicines by Physician’s: A Study on Anti-Allergic Drugs in and around Hyderabad, India.

Abstract

The Physician’s prescription decision is a complex process that involves a variety of effects. In numerous cases, the choices of physician’s are multifactorial and may take up several strategies when making their prescribing decision, and several kinds of critical heuristics in conducting their duties of patient treatment. Previous studies conducted in different countries deployed various complex propositions to understand how several factors impact physician’s decision-making in their general practice. However, to the best of our knowledge, most of the propositions can’t solely explain the medical rule decision of physicians and affiliated factors. This has redounded in demands for further theoretical exploration to develop better interventions demanded towards understanding the dynamics of physician’s prescribing decision process. The main objective of our research is to develop a framework and understand the factors affecting the physician’s prescribing behavior among respiratory physicians (ENT+Chest Physicians) in and around Hyderabad, India. The individual independent factors based on which framework has been constructed were derived from the literature review, including the questionnaire, and integrated the same with a personality assessment instrument for testing the model and hypothesis of each independent factor on the physician’s prescribing behavior. The determined sample size was 170 physicians with various practice set-ups. For Analyzing the data mixed approach has been adopted consisting of both descriptive and inferential statistical methods comprising of factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis using the SPSS 21 version. The results showed that a physician’s prescribing behavior is influenced by a set of factors namely, Product related factors, physician professional factors, and Physician’s personality factors. Product Promotional factors from various pharmaceutical organizations, could not influence physicians in their prescribing decision, as the items forming this factor could not reach statistically significant levels.