Pflegemarktforschung

SIS conducts Qualitative and Quantitative Market Research with nurses, nurse educators, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals.  We conduct research across the US, and in Europe, China, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Healthcare markets differ from country to country.  North America has the highest healthcare spending.  Demand for nursing care has increased because of the expanding senior population. Europe has a strong government involvement in Healthcare, impacting Nursing professionals’ daily lives.   Asia has a diverse mix of countries ranging from young to aging populations, impacting the demand for healthcare.

Die Gesundheitssysteme in ländlichen und abgelegenen Gebieten weltweit stehen vor Herausforderungen. Eine weitere Herausforderung ist die sinkende Zahl ausgebildeter Pflegekräfte.

The following are the Nursing professionals, particularly from the US healthcare market perspective, who provide valuable insight in Market Research projects and studies.

Nursing Market Research: How Leading Health Systems Build Workforce Advantage

Nursing market research has moved from HR support function to boardroom intelligence. Health system CEOs, medtech commercial leaders, and pharmaceutical market access teams now treat the nursing workforce as a primary commercial variable. Staffing models shape contract pricing, device adoption curves, and clinical trial enrollment velocity. The firms that read this signal early are pulling ahead.

The opportunity sits in three places: workforce supply intelligence, point-of-care influence mapping, and product adoption diagnostics. Each requires a different research design. Each rewards specificity.

Why Nursing Market Research Now Drives Commercial Strategy

Nurses control more procurement influence than any other clinical role. They specify wound care formularies, infusion sets, surgical instruments, IV catheters, monitoring devices, and increasingly biologics administration protocols. A Magnet-designated hospital evaluates a vascular access device through nurse-led value analysis committees before a physician sees the proposal.

Commercial leaders at Becton Dickinson, Baxter, Stryker, and Medline have restructured field teams around this reality. The clinical nurse specialist, the wound ostomy continence nurse (WOCN), and the infection preventionist now sit at the center of B2B healthcare buying. Research designs that route around these roles produce inflated forecasts.

Based on SIS International Research engagements across acute care and ambulatory settings, the gap between physician-stated preference and nurse-driven specification often exceeds 30 percent on consumables and capital equipment under $250,000. Sales forecasts built on KOL interviews alone systematically miss this delta.

The Workforce Supply Signal Inside Every Health System Forecast

Nursing supply economics shape every healthcare commercial assumption downstream. Travel nurse rates, agency utilization, and registered nurse vacancy rates predict capital deferral, elective volume recovery, and service line expansion timing. A health system running 12 percent RN vacancy postpones robotic surgery investment regardless of physician demand.

The structural drivers are visible to anyone reading state board of nursing data: aging workforce, faculty shortages limiting nursing school throughput, and accelerated retirement among Baby Boomer cohorts. The non-obvious driver is geographic mismatch. Sun Belt growth markets are absorbing supply faster than schools in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and the Carolinas can produce it. Northeast and upper Midwest systems face a different problem: wage compression against lower cost-of-living competitors.

Pharmaceutical launch teams use this intelligence to sequence rollouts. A specialty infusion product launching into oncology infusion centers needs different staffing assumptions in Phoenix than in Cleveland. Generic launch maps miss this entirely.

Point-of-Care Influence Mapping for Medtech and Pharma

The most useful nursing market research isolates decision authority by product category, care setting, and institutional governance model. The same drug behaves differently across an academic medical center, a 340B disproportionate share hospital, and an ambulatory infusion suite owned by a payer.

Influence mapping starts with the value analysis committee structure. Integrated delivery networks like Kaiser Permanente, Intermountain, and Geisinger run centralized clinical sourcing with nurse leaders holding category authority. HCA, CommonSpirit, and Ascension delegate more to facility-level VACs. The research approach differs accordingly.

SIS International’s structured B2B expert interview programs with chief nursing officers, directors of nursing, and frontline charge nurses consistently surface three decision filters: workflow integration, training burden, and infection control documentation. Products that score high on physician preference but require RN workflow redesign stall in committee for 14 to 22 months.

Methodologies That Generate Decision-Grade Intelligence

Generic survey panels produce generic answers. Nursing market research benefits from mixed-methodology designs that combine ethnographic observation with structured quantitative validation.

The methods that produce signal:

• Clinical ethnographic research in med-surg units, ORs, and emergency departments to observe actual product use against stated protocol
• B2B expert interviews with CNOs, nurse managers, and clinical educators to map governance and budget authority
• Quantitative segmentation across ANCC certifications, BSN versus ADN credentialing, and years of experience
• Patient journey mapping co-created with bedside nurses to identify intervention points missed by physician-only research
• KOL mapping extended beyond physicians to nursing thought leaders, AACN faculty, and specialty society board members

The discipline matters. A wound care manufacturer studying pressure injury prevention needs WOCN-certified respondents, not general med-surg RNs. A continuous glucose monitor study targeting hospital adoption needs diabetes care and education specialists (CDCES), not endocrinologists alone.

Three Use Cases Driving Investment in Nursing Market Research

Three commercial questions are pulling Fortune 500 healthcare companies toward deeper nursing intelligence.

Market access and formulary positioning. Pharmaceutical market access teams need payer value stories that account for nursing administration burden. A biologic requiring complex reconstitution loses share to a ready-to-use competitor even at higher unit cost when nurse time is priced correctly into total cost of care.

Product adoption diagnostics. Medical device companies running win-loss analysis on stalled accounts find that nurse rejection, not physician indifference, explains most losses. The signal is missed when win-loss interviews target only the named decision-maker.

Workforce strategy for health systems. Hospital operators sizing travel nurse spend, evaluating virtual nursing platforms, or modeling international recruitment need supply intelligence calibrated to specialty, shift differential economics, and license compact reciprocity.

The SIS Approach to Nursing Workforce and Influence Research

SIS International Research has conducted healthcare commercial intelligence engagements across 135 countries, including mixed-methodology nursing studies in Brazil, Mexico, and across Western Europe where nurse practitioner authority varies sharply by jurisdiction. The recurring lesson: nursing research designs built for the United States rarely port cleanly to markets where nurse credentialing, scope of practice, and procurement authority follow different rules.

SIS International’s proprietary research in healthcare commercial strategy indicates that companies running parallel nurse and physician research streams, then triangulating against value analysis committee documentation, produce launch forecasts with materially tighter accuracy than single-stakeholder designs.

What Strong Nursing Market Research Delivers

The deliverable that justifies the investment is not a deck of statistics. It is a defensible model linking nursing workforce variables to commercial outcomes: forecasted unit volume by account, time-to-formulary by health system archetype, and competitive vulnerability by product category. Nursing market research becomes strategic when it answers questions a CFO can act on.

Key Questions

Q: What is nursing market research?
A: Nursing market research is structured commercial intelligence that quantifies nurse influence on procurement, product adoption, and workforce economics across health systems, ambulatory care, and specialty settings. It combines ethnographic observation, B2B expert interviews with CNOs and clinical specialists, and quantitative segmentation.

Q: Why does nursing research matter for medical device and pharmaceutical companies?
A: Nurses drive specification on consumables, capital equipment under $250,000, and administration-sensitive biologics through value analysis committees. Forecasts built only on physician KOL interviews systematically overstate adoption and understate time-to-formulary.

Q: How is nursing workforce supply intelligence used in commercial planning?
A: RN vacancy rates, travel nurse spend, and specialty certification density predict elective volume recovery, capital investment timing, and service line expansion by geography. Launch sequencing improves when these variables enter the model.

Q: What methodologies produce the most useful nursing market intelligence?
A: Mixed-methodology designs combining clinical ethnography, structured CNO and nurse manager interviews, value analysis committee mapping, and quantitative segmentation by credentialing and specialty. Single-method panel surveys produce surface-level findings.

Q: How does nursing research differ across international markets?
A: Nurse credentialing, scope of practice, and procurement authority vary sharply by country. Research designs built for U.S. acute care require recalibration for Brazil, Germany, Japan, and emerging markets where physician dominance or government procurement changes the influence map.

Über SIS International

SIS International bietet quantitative, qualitative und strategische Forschung an. Wir liefern Daten, Tools, Strategien, Berichte und Erkenntnisse zur Entscheidungsfindung. Wir führen auch Interviews, Umfragen, Fokusgruppen und andere Methoden und Ansätze der Marktforschung durch. Kontakt für Ihr nächstes Marktforschungsprojekt.