Leveraging Centrality Measures in Healthcare Provider Networks to Provide a Decision Framework that Enhances Product Outreach

The healthcare system is an elastic industry with constantly changing circumstances. Decision-makers are challenged to make difficult decisions in the industry with little information. Pharmaceutical companies in the healthcare industry are challenged to keep up with the ever-changing industry. In this paper, we break down the stakeholders within the pharmaceutical industry and investigate how best to enhance outreach to healthcare providers for pharmaceutical companies. This paper views healthcare providers as a social network, using adjacency matrices where healthcare providers are the nodes and relationships are the edges. The paper investigates centrality measures and how they can provide information about nodes within the social network. The model proposed in this paper uses predefined centrality measures and incorporates stakeholder analysis to weigh the importance of a certain centrality measure. The model provides decision-makers with an overall centrality score of a certain node based on stakeholder input, thus en-hancing their ability to make a more informed decision with their allocation of resources in an ever-changing industry. This paper presents decision makers with a framework model that uses centrality measures to help improve the outreach of products in healthcare provider networks.