Editor's note: Jerry Arbittier is CEO of Arbittier Opinion Panel Systems LLC. He can be reached at jerry.arbittier@aops.us.
In the summer of 2000, I met with Howard Ziment, CEO of the Ziment Group, a marketing research company that specialized in health care. He was interested in building a panel of physicians to complete marketing research surveys on the internet. Ziment was an early believer in the value of developing a physician panel. In fact, by the time we met, he had been working on the concept for five years and had recruited around 8,000 physicians. At our meeting, he told me that a major competitor had indicated that they had a physician panel. Competition breeds innovation, as the saying goes, and in this case competition increased the urgency for building the panel. He sought me out because of my background in building panels for media marketing research company Arbitron. While media research and health care research are quite different, he felt my experience would allow me to build a successful physician panel. I accepted the position, not realizing that his vision would lead to what is now estimated to be a $300-$400 million data collection industry.
Currently, between 5-10% of physicians in the United States participate in marketing research studies each year. A physician marketing research study usually includes only 150-250 respondents because of the limited population and the limited participation rate. This is minuscule in comparison to the size of most consumer studies. Greater insights could be obtained if larger physician sample sizes could be reached by the existing data collection companies. In fact, all the current data collection companies increase the number of respondents that they can deliver by purchasing sample from their competitors as their respondent delivery drops over the fielding of a study. However, even with this pooling of resources (termed “topping off”), they cann...