This blog is part of an ongoing series, A Brave New World: Finding Life Sciences Success in Modern Markets.

Launching a new product in life sciences is more consequential than ever. Yet, manufacturers who confine their analysis to the performance of their own brands risk losing sight of the broader dynamics that truly shape market success. By focusing solely on individual products, organizations may overlook critical patterns and opportunities that emerge only when launches are examined across the entire universe of prescribers, therapies, and drug classes.

This above-brand perspective is essential, not just for understanding how quickly providers adopt new innovations, but for revealing the behavioral trends, competitive forces, and specialty-specific nuances that drive adoption at scale. Only by stepping back to see the forest, rather than just the trees, can launch teams unlock smarter strategies, maximize impact, and ensure their products thrive in a complex, interconnected marketplace.

In an era of heightened industry pressure and declining performance, rigorous benchmarking is indispensable to ensure strategic decisions are grounded in evidence, not assumptions or outdated views of market performance. Without clear benchmarks and a broad perspective, even the strongest brands risk falling behind in a market that demands continuous adaptation and excellence.

How Above-Brand Analytics with LAI Transform Product Launches

Above-brand analytics are transforming launch strategy. The Launch Adoption Index (LAI) is a breakthrough metric that measures how quickly healthcare providers (HCPs) adopt new therapies compared to their peers, using AI-driven behavioral science to pinpoint early adopters, optimize targeting, and ultimately improve launch performance. Unlike traditional models that focus on high-volume prescribers or limited early adoption analysis, LAI reveals the true drivers of brand adoption, helping launch teams segment markets, allocate resources efficiently, and forecast uptake with greater accuracy. By identifying innovators and tailoring engagement strategies, manufacturers can accelerate launch performance and respond quickly to market signals.

LAI methodology surpasses traditional brand and therapeutic-level analyses by evaluating adoption across over one million HCPs and ~2,000 launches within the IQVIA universe. The resulting study, the industry’s largest of its kind, enables flexible, data-driven insights through advanced analytics and AI models. For each HCP-launch product combination, the LAI calculates days to first written prescription, then aggregates results by HCP, adjusting for therapeutic category via a proprietary benchmarking algorithm.

The resulting HCP segmentation capabilities empower launch teams to pinpoint true innovators and early adopters, those most likely to adopt new therapies early and drive momentum. Targeting these fast movers with tailored engagement strategies accelerates uptake, while slower adopters can be approached with different tactics to accelerate adoption based upon demonstrated behavior or prioritized later in the launch cycle. For brands faced with scarce resources, this enables smarter promotional allocation and sharper forecasting, offering early signals when adoption lags.

Benchmarking Adoption Speed by Specialty

Adoption rates for new treatments reveal striking differences across medical specialties. Plotting adoption speed deciles against days to adoption demonstrates how physician specialties vary in their willingness to prescribe new medicines. For example, most endocrinologists begin prescribing new products within the first year of launch, positioning them as rapid adopters. In contrast, nephrologists, one of the slower adopting specialties, are far more cautious, with the average time to adoption stretching to six years.

Source: Excludes vaccines; Physician Targeting Library; LAAD.

The diversity of adoption speed within specialties is equally notable and can be observed for more detailed analysis. Oncology, which is often thought of as an early adopting specialty, has a segment that consistently adopts new products, however the median time to adoption occurs between years three and four suggesting there are many factors at play.

For oncologists, the median time to adopt a new therapy is 3.5 years, yet 20% consistently prescribe within the first two years.

Source: IQVIA Analysis; Launch Success Encyclopedia, Physician Targeting Library, LAAD 2013-2025, Xponent 2013-2024.

Identifying adoption rates within a therapeutic area is essential for forming effective launch strategies. Early analysis enables precise targeting of providers most likely to adopt quickly, generate volume, and become strong advocates for the brand. It also provides valuable insights for designing short- and long-term promotional plans. These plans should prioritize early adopters, especially highly persistent and productive specialists within the brand’s therapy area.

Early adopting providers not only drive volume when a brand first enters the market, they often serve as key opinion leaders or peer advocates who influence others and become champions for it. During launch, benchmarking adoption against established norms enables early assessment of product performance and helps optimize promotional spend for stronger return on investment.

These insights are more than statistics; they provide a roadmap for launch success. To maximize impact, launch teams must identify and engage early adopters, especially those who influence their peers. By tailoring outreach and promotional efforts to these key providers, organizations can accelerate uptake and drive broader acceptance.

Understanding and Influencing HCP Behavior

Evaluating adoption offers new insights to improve provider engagement. Creating strategies that drive a leftward shift in adoption to happen earlier creates qualitative and quantitative research opportunities. Asking the question why this observed behavior exists leads to HCP specific insights on how to influence it. Observed reasons could include the influence of peer networks, promotional sensitivity to in-person or digital interactions, the role of evidence beyond clinical trials, or as in the oncology case study, the need to establish treatment pathways.

Source: IQVIA U.S. Center for Thought Leadership & Innovation; Patient Targeting Library; LAAD.

In a launch environment where there are more brands missing forecast than hitting, the adoption rate of HCPs for promotional targeting is an essential element for success:

• Precision Targeting in Large, Complex Markets
  IQVIA analysis reveals that market volume explains only 10%-30% of variation in adoption. LAI highlights the intersection between volume and speed of adoption. This precision targeting directs the sales force and promotional resources to areas where they will have the greatest impact in the shortest time. Behavioral analytics more effectively identify early adopters, enabling targeted segmentation and more efficient promotional strategies. If launching into a market that is saturated with other effective drug therapy options or when resources are limited, knowing which providers to target is critical to optimize spend. The LAI has also been shown to be predictive of switching behavior within a therapeutic class. HCPs with faster adoption speeds are also those who are most likely to move away from a brand if given a therapeutic alternative.
• Building Early Momentum in New Therapeutic Areas
  When launching into a market where a company lacks experience or leadership, it takes time to build credibility. LAI helps to identify the providers most likely to try a new product early, who can generate real-world data, influence their peers, and help build critical momentum. This also holds true when launching a first-in-class therapy that may require even greater influence to convince providers to adopt and champion the brand.
• Accelerating Time to Peak Sales in a Compressed Regulatory Environment
  With policies like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the timeline to achieve commercial success may shrink to as little as nine years. Brands have less time to reach peak sales before price negotiations begin. LAI helps to drive volume and value out of the gate, focusing on providers who will write scripts and gain experience quickly. This can mean the difference between hitting peak sales in four years versus eight.
• Drive Patient Acquisition and Develop Accurate Forecasts
  Understanding provider adoption rates is crucial for building more accurate uptake forecasts. While peak preference share is important in deriving a long-term forecast, the time to peak share and the shape of the uptake curve is very important. In the modern launch environment, aggressively acquiring patients in the first year of a launch is critical to the long-term growth of a product.

Segmenting physician targets by adoption speed, not just volume and targeting high value doctors will accelerate new patient acquisition. Accurately accounting for new patient acquisition and developing the right new to brand (NTB) uptake curve is fundamental in developing an accurate long-term NTB forecast. This foundation strengthens strategic decision making and planning around sales force sizing, promotional investment, and brand optimization from launch and throughout the lifecycle of a brand.

Source: Launch Center Of Excellence Research; Abbreviations: NTB: New-to-Brand; Includes launches from 2000 through 2018.

Early Adoption Can Be Contagious: Group Practice Behavior

One early adopter is good; a group of early adopters is better. Launches succeed when they identify and engage early adopters who will not only prescribe but also influence peers to do the same. The LAI shows that early adoption behavior can be observed at the practice level. This means adoption is not purely an individual trait, the practice environment matters as does the sequence of adoption within a practice. Early adoption is influenced by peer interactions, shared resources, and institutional culture. Strong brands and organization invest not just into individual targeting strategies, but also invest in building practice level relationships.

Source: IQVIA U.S. Center for Thought Leadership & Innovation; Physician Targeting Library; LAAD; 242K unique providers.

The group practice effect has practical implications for launch strategy. If group practice is identified as early adopting, it should become a priority for initial uptake and peer influence. This can be particularly true when pursuing an asymmetric launch strategy against larger competitors with deeper pockets and larger resource pools they can activate.

Engaging the entire practice through group level detailing, grand rounds, targeted speaker programs, or securing a champion within the group can yield a multiplier effect as colleagues reinforce each other’s behavior. This also means sales representatives or Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) should approach early adopter practices differently: rather than just focusing on one doctor, they should coordinate efforts across the practice to educate on the new product.

Provider Adoption as a Predictor of Launch Performance

Broadly, the life sciences industry struggles with predictive analytics and often resorts to reactive descriptive analysis. By broadly studying HCP behavior demonstrated across many launches, future looking probabilistic analysis can be utilized. Consider the real-world example of a product that launched in 2023. Providers with faster adoption scores prescribed significantly more of the product than those with slower adoption scores. HCPs in the fastest adoption decile wrote on average 3.8 prescriptions each, which was 2.2x more than the 1.7 prescriptions per HCP in the slowest decile. In aggregate, that fastest group accounted for about 15% of the brands’ prescriptions, whereas the slowest group accounted for only 7%.

This demonstrates a predictive power: if a launch team had used LAI scores to target the brand’s rollout, they could have anticipated which doctors would contribute disproportionately to early uptake. For instance, the fast adopter segment could have been prioritized for early engagement efforts, knowing they were likely to drive volume quickly. For this brand, promotional costs far exceeded gross sales, creating a net negative on the balance sheet. Had investment been paced with prescribing probability, the time to promotional breakeven would be much earlier in the lifecycle.

Source: Physician Targeting Library; LAAD; Launch Adoption Index based on all launches prior to Product X.

How Provider Adoption Predicts Launch Performance and Market Success

Amid economic pressure and evolving policy constraints, launch strategies must evolve to reflect today’s realities. One of the most important factors to consider is incorporating modern metrics such as provider adoption rates. Without these insights, teams are flying blind, relying on reactive analytics to navigate the most challenging launch environment of the past decade. Provider adoption dynamics can be integrated throughout the launch process to:

• Develop a Precision Behavioral Based Target List
  Start by overlaying provider adoption on traditional volume or access-based segmentation. Identify high volume, rapid adopters and create sales strategies to accelerate adoption in this group. For small companies, this can reduce the target list from tens of thousands to a manageable few thousand.
• Drive Promotional Efficiency
  Allocate promotional resources asymmetrically by spending more where there is likely early adoption. Use provider adoption to dial the promotional mix and campaign measurement by specialty, geography, and channel preference. Allocating resources with a targeted approach can prevent unnecessary spend while preserving investment and driving profitability.
• Build Early Momentum and Influence
  Focus on providers or practices who are likely to try the product first while tapping into the HCP referral network. Their real-world experience will influence later adopters and help to penetrate deeper into the market. Peer influence can be observed when studying network adoption utilizing the LAI. Who matters most? Where are they? Why?
• Validate and Enhance Existing Insights
  Even if an organization has years of data on provider behavior in related markets, provider adoption offers a broader, above-brand perspective. It can validate assumptions or provide incremental insight beyond what is already known.

The Bottom Line

IQVIA’s proprietary Launch Adoption Index is a powerful, AI-driven, HCP behavioral tool. In today’s market, leveraging provider adoption behavior is essential for building effective launch strategies and maximizing promotional impact. By focusing resources on high adopters, companies can drive early uptake and validate their insights for sustained success. Embracing these data-driven approaches enables organizations to navigate the evolving life sciences landscape and achieve meaningful outcomes.

Please contact your IQVIA representative for more information.