OBJECTIVES: Adoption of new drug in medical care, a highly-regulated industry, is and essential in terms of access to newtreatment option and raise on health care expenditure. Thisstudy, using Cox2 as example, is to examine the diffusion of newdrug among hospitals of different characteristics. METHOD:The data were drawn from systematic random sample of NHIclaim data in 1997 to 2001. We applied the Bass diffusion modelto analyze the monthly number of each hospital’s outpatientclinic visits with COX2. Bass diffusion model based on the initialtime of purchase of product to explains the behavior of the dif-fusion of the product in the market: length to reach maximummonthly volume, maximum monthly volume, growth rate.RESULTS: The estimates of Bass diffusion model shows that themonthly numbers of outpatient clinic visits with COX2 pre-scription reached the stable maximum in the 92th month, 41months after the introduction of COX2 on April of 2001. Thelength of growth period for reaching maximum volume variedwith different accreditation level of hospital: academic medicalcenter 38 months, metropolitan hospitals 43 months, local com-munity hospitals 40 months, and physician clinics 51 months.The average of maximum volume for academic center was 76.17outpatient visits, metropolitan hospitals 87.25 visits, local com-munity hospitals 62.65 visits, and physician clinics 34.38 visits.Physician clinics has the fast growth rate (q = 0.1278), in con-trast to the slowest of local community hospitals (q = 0.1159),CONCLUSION: Hospitals of different level vary in terms ofadopting new drugs. Academic medical centers play the role ofinnovators.
