Mixed Modeling for Physician-Direct Campaigns

Abstract

Today, pharmaceutical companies leverage multiple channels, such as sales rep visits, samples, professional journals, and even consumer mass media, to reach out to physicians in order to increase product awareness and drug knowledge to gain incremental market share or prescribing volume. Measuring the influence of each individual channel is critical for future planning and resource optimization. The analytic challenge occurs when physicians are exposed to multiple channels simultaneously and the impact of each channel may have different life spans. Traditional ANCOVA (analysis of variance with covariates) is no longer sufficient to see the whole picture. In this paper, we will present a mixed modeling approach to longitudinal data to answer two important business questions: (1) How effective are different channels in promoting sales? (2) How should we allocate resources across multiple channels?