Physician social capital and the reported adoption of evidence-based medicine: Exploring the role of structural holes

The present study explores the role that professional networks play in the propensity of hospital physicians to adopt and implement evidence-based medicine (EBM) into clinical practice. Using attributional and relational data collected from a sample of 207 physicians in six Italian National Health Service hospitals, social network techniques were used to analyze the structure of the networks representing professional interactions among the surveyed hospital physicians. Ordinal logistic regression was applied to analyze the association between the structural features of physicians’ networks and their self-reported propensity to implement EBM into daily practice. Physicians who were highly constrained in their interpersonal networks were less likely to report adopting EBM, suggesting that the cohesion induced by social interactions may hamper, rather than foster, the diffusion of scientific information within professional groups. We discuss the implications of the observed interaction patterns for hospital administrators and policy makers.

Research highlights
► High cohesion induced by social interactions among physicians may hamper the adoption of EBM.
► Physician social capital structure in six Italian NHS hospitals was explored.
► The association between clinicians' network structure and EBM adoption was studied.
► The higher the constraint of inter-physician networks, the lower their EBM adoption.
► The implications of the observed interaction patterns were discussed.