Each month WaveData collects the prices of medicines and devices from pharmacies and dispensing doctors. These come from the price lists and invoices sent to these accounts by their suppliers. So what we’re looking at here is the ‘share of voice’ rather than market share, which specifically means the amount of effort put into advertising these products to accounts.
From the data it appears that if you discount the first couple of years, during which WaveData was building his operation, the number of prices collected from pharmacies and GPs has grown slowly from about 90,000 a month up to over 100,000. Over the same time period the number of device data points has varied like a camel’s back.
There were two high points when over 10,000 records have been collected each month in 2005 and 2011 but since 2012 it’s been relatively steady at about 5,000 data points a month. This suggests that either that the amount of R&D work on devices is not translating to what’s used on the ground or that the device companies are not good at commercialisation.