SCUELJapan healthcare data

Solutions · Key physicians

Who leads this field in Japan is one of the first questions, and the hardest to answer from outside

Ask anyone inside the therapeutic area and you will get names. Ask for the reasoning behind the order, or for the twenty after the first five, and the conversation runs out. What is missing is not knowledge but a way to put it in a defensible sequence.

What goes into the ranking

Five inputs, from across the JMDC Group.

Board certifications and designations Over five hundred qualifications across the medical societies, including some the societies do not publish as lists, plus the designations that authorise a physician to certify patients for public support in intractable disease. SCUEL physician database.
Research and trial history Which trials a physician has run, on which condition and which compound. Which research projects they have been funded for, and on what subject. SCUEL physician database, from the public trial registry and research grant records.
Conference presentations What a physician has presented, and where. Drawn from a body of over half a million conference abstracts. Iyaku Joho Net, a JMDC Group company.
Institutional context The patient population at the institution where they work, and whether that institution has historically adopted new treatments early. SCUEL facility data and JMDC claims data.
Reach within the institution Their position, and how many outpatient sessions they hold — a physician with a title and no clinic time occupies a different role from one with the reverse. SCUEL physician database.

Why no single source is enough

Publication counts favour academic medicine and undercount the clinician seeing the most patients. Patient volumes favour large institutions regardless of whether anyone there is shaping practice. Board certification is a threshold, not a ranking.

Each of these is a reasonable proxy for influence and each is wrong on its own. What makes the combination useful is that they are wrong in different directions.

What the output looks like

One row per physician, with the components visible.

PhysicianInstitution ScorePresentations PapersCertified Patients at site
—Hospital B771 6yes100+
—Hospital D683 1yes50–99
—Hospital A521 4yes50–99
—Hospital C421 2no50–99

The score is a weighted combination, and the weights are set with you rather than by us. A company launching a first-in-class treatment weights research and trial history heavily. A company defending an established product in a crowded field weights patient volume and clinic time. The same inputs produce different orders, and which order is right is a commercial judgement, not a statistical one.

Because every component stays in the file, an internal reviewer can see why a physician sits where they do — and disagree with the weighting rather than with the data.

How to read it, and how not to

Four things worth being explicit about.

These are proxies for influence, not measurements of it Presentations and publications indicate engagement with a field. They do not measure how many colleagues a physician actually persuades.
Tags reflect interest, not treatment volume A tag is assigned from what a physician has published or presented on. It is not a count of how often they treat the condition.
Counts include the same person more than once Physicians hold multiple qualifications, so summing across categories double-counts. Numbers for a defined target set are worked out separately.
Collection timing differs by source Society rosters, trial registries and grant records are gathered on their own cycles, so recency varies between fields within one file.

Why this is harder for a company new to Japan

The informal layer is the part you cannot buy.

Japanese academic medicine is organised around university departments that place physicians in affiliated hospitals, and those placements shape referral patterns and professional standing in ways that no list of qualifications will show you. A company that has been in Japan for thirty years has that map in the heads of its field team.

A ranking built from published evidence does not replicate it. What it does is give a company without that history somewhere defensible to start — and, once a field team exists, something for them to correct against rather than a blank page. Market entry →

Tell us the therapeutic area and what the ranking is for, and we will tell you which inputs matter and what the result will not tell you. Working with us from outside Japan? Read how engagements run first.

Send an enquiry

Engagements typically start from several million Japanese yen — indicatively, tens of thousands of US dollars. The US dollar figure is for scale only and is not a quoted price. Scope, coverage and contract term determine the final figure.