Identifying physician professional relationship networks (the invisible social networks between physicians that influence decisions to try and adopt new technology) can provide valuable knowledge for pharmaceutical sales and marketing applications.

There are several different types of “leaders” that affect the diffusion of new ideas in medicine:

• Formal, organizational, leaders—those who are elected, appointed, or employed in leadership roles within a formal organization (associations, societies, advocacy groups, guideline committees, academic chairs, etc.)
  
• Publishing leaders—those who publish extensively within a given therapeutic area and have established expertise within specific areas of medicine.
  
• Sociometric leaders—individuals who have established themselves among their peers as experts and are frequently mentioned as discussion or advice partners.
  
• Volume leaders—those who have extensive experience by the nature of their practice size; however, these individuals are not considered by their peers as experts, don’t publish or speak, and do not hold a formal position of leadership.
  

Because different methods of identifying Opinion Leaders (OL) generate different results, Rivermark employs multiple and complementary OL identification approaches. This allows us to deliver a complete picture of opinion leadership within a defined market. All but one of these leadership domains is detectable through secondary research techniques; however, sociometric leadership can only be discovered using our proven techniques for data collection and analysis.

Advantages of using sociometrics for Opinion Leader identification

• Capitalizes on interpersonal relationships that already exist and are naturally occurring
  
• Uses the community’s nominated opinion leaders rather than relying on leaders to self-select themselves or have their selection imposed by some outside authority or data.
  

Identifying Opinion Leaders, Mapping Relationships and Measuring Influence

Social network analysis is an established behavioral science that seeks to examine the flow of information through groups of individuals. The discipline recognizes the importance of informal, interpersonal relations in social system.

Sociograms are visual “maps” of social networks, with each point representing an individual, and each line indicates a relationship between individuals in the network. This allows researchers to identify opinion leaders and followers within the network, as well as those who are isolated from social influence. Also allows for identification of specific “communities” of connected individuals.