Understanding Physicians’ Internet Adoption Pattern: A Hybrid Approach for Pharmaceutical Marketing

The phenomenon of user acceptance of technology including Internet has become one of the key research themes by various researchers. The emergence of Internet has brought changes in traditional methods of marketing communications almost for every sector including the pharmaceutical industry. Previous researchers have mentioned that the Internet adoption among the physicians' (especially in developing countries context) is need to be examined by deploying predominantly established models like TAM, IDT and TRI. Therefore an extensive review of literature emphasizing on IDT, TAM and TRI studies has been conducted; also the studies which examined physicians' adoption of technology have been reviewed. The review of literature indicates that the prominent model and theories like TAM and IDT has some limitations in explaining user acceptance and these limitations could be tackled by integration. The literature also supported that integrated models of TAM and IDT and TAM and TRI have explained user acceptance phenomenon superiorly to TAM. Therefore, the various relationships which have been postulated in previous studies were recorded and analyzed. The literature reported that TAM examines effect of perceived beliefs, IDT examines effect of innovation attributes, and TRI examines effect of individual's readiness on acceptance and no framework is available which checks combine impact of these models. Hence based on a critical analysis of literature, this study suggests an integrated framework consisting of Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Technology Readiness Index for examining adoption pattern of Internet among physician. Future research directions about the integration have also been suggested.