Healthcare Insights

Top 20 medical specialties with highest propensity to prescribe branded drugs

Physicians and healthcare providers have ever-increasing options for medications to recommend to their patients.

For biopharma companies looking to maximize the potential return on investment for a new drug, insight into provider prescription activity is key. With this intelligence, a biopharma company can identify and engage with the physicians most likely to prescribe their medication to patients.

How can provider prescribing activity be measured and tracked?

To help understand a provider’s prescribing behavior, Definitive Healthcare developed a “Propensity to Prescribe Brand Name Drugs” dashboard.

For each physician, the percent of historical prescriptions written for brand name drugs is calculated and compared to all other physicians in their specialty. Higher scores reflect a provider’s tendency to prescribe brand name drugs for their patients instead of generics in comparison to their peers.

Using PhysicianView, we analyzed over 295,000 healthcare providers that had either a “high” or “very high” propensity to prescribe brand name drugs.

The following are the top primary specialties of providers with the highest likelihood to select a branded versus generic medication.

Number of physician specialists by highest propensity to prescribe branded drugs

RankPrimary specialtyNumber of providersExplore dataset
1Family Practice46,134Explore
2Internal Medicine42,103Explore
3Pediatric Medicine20,065Explore
4Emergency Medicine18,276Explore
5Obstetrics & Gynecology16,678Explore
6Psychiatry16,481Explore
7Cardiology - Cardiologist9,882Explore
8Surgery - Orthopedic Surgery9,956Explore
9Hospitalist8,873Explore
10Ophthalmology8,421Explore
11Neurology7,375Explore
12Gastroenterology7,213Explore
13Surgery - General Surgery7,201Explore
14Dermatology6,095Explore
15Pulmonary Disease4,820Explore
16Urology4,691Explore
17Nephrology4,424Explore
18Otolaryngology4,403Explore
19Oncology - Hematology/Oncology4,294Explore
20General Practice4,750Explore

Fig. 1 Data is from the Definitive Healthcare PhysicianView product. Physician Dashboard data is proprietary and aggregated from commercial claims data sourced from multiple medical claims clearinghouses in the United States. Data accurate as of September 2021.

Which provider specialties have the highest likelihood to prescribe branded medications?

Family medicine and internal medicine top the list with over 88,000 of these physicians having the highest propensity to prescribe branded drugs. Pediatric medicine, emergency medicine and obstetrics and gynecology round out the top five primary specialties on the list.

Healthcare Insights are developed with data from the Definitive Healthcare platform. Want even more insights? Start a free trial now and get access to the highest quality healthcare commercial intelligence on hospitals, physicians and other healthcare providers.