More than 75% of the female respondents in this study would choose a women's health center (WHC) over a standard health facility. Women who worked outside the home perceived a greater WHC need. And almost all respondents were interested in communications from the center via a quarterly newsletter. Significant test results related to age, income, education, and work status as segmentation variables, offering WHC's an opportunity to target their patients with specialized services such as cosmetic surgery, infertility treatment, breast imaging, etc. If enough resources are allocated, a WHC can design itself to attract highly lucrative patients. Little difference was found in the opinions of women regarding the need for a WHC or the core services desired, but the specific service mix decision must be carefully considered when designing a WHC.
Performance on a particular attribute has an asymmetric impact on patient satisfaction. Gaining insight into this asymmetric effect can help refine management tools such as impact analysis. For overall satisfaction, negative performance on an attribute will have a much larger impact than positive performance. Therefore, managers should optimize, rather than maximize attribute-level performance to maximize patient satisfaction. Because of this asymmetry, the benefit from eliminating negative performance may be larger than the benefit gained from increasing positive performance on an attribute. So you can increase overall satisfaction faster by eliminating the negatives.
Most complaints about HMOs fall into three broad categories: quality of care, provider attitude, and accessibility to care. Of these, marketers should focus their efforts on the latter. Ensuring that subscribers understand their benefits can help reduce expectations and, therefore, dissatisfaction. Even though accessibility to care (as covered benefits) was very important in contributing to survey respondents' satisfaction with their health care, overall satisfaction did not affect a patient's decision to change physicians and only marginally affected the decision to change HMOs. In the member/provider relationship, the primary care physician may represent a barrier to benefits because he or she has the power to control access under the HMO structure.
Even though there is intuitive appeal in identifying the user profile for a given service and then targeting similar nonusers, this approach can be very misleading when marketing health care services with low market penetration. If usage segmentation is employed without checking other indicators of latent demand and perceived barriers to use, significant misallocation of marketing resources is likely to occur. Confidentiality and embarrassment can be significant barriers to use by segments that are excellent patient prospects. In this study of mental and behavioral care, females and non-whites were found to be more concerned with confidentiality than were members of the user group. Lack of awareness can be a much bigger impediment to adoption than negative attitudes. Health care marketers need to design communications that not only increase awareness and familiarity for services with low market penetration, but also address other issues of concern to highly receptive segments.
A strong relationship exists between employee satisfaction and patients' perceptions of the quality of their care, measured in terms of their intent to return and to recommend the hospital to others. Employee dissatisfaction can negatively affect quality of care and have an adverse effect on patient loyalty and, thus hospital profitability. Therefore, health care marketers should regularly measure employee satisfaction as one way to monitor service quality. Health care marketers must work more closely with their human-resource departments to understand and influence employees' work environment and maintain a high level of job satisfaction. Marketers also should place an increased emphasis on both employee and patient perceptions of satisfaction when developing internal and external strategic marketing plans and formulating future research.
Although Clinton's Health Security Act was unsuccessful, the President's first term did see considerable headway in health care policy, including the Health Insurance Reform Act, the Family and Medical leave Act, and improvements to both Medicare and Medicaid programs. Whether the result of a federal reform plan or free-market forces, efforts to control health care costs hinge on continued growth of managed care. Capitation is the wave of the future, according to some experts. America's aging population is rapidly overwhelming the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund. Clinton's balanced-budget proposal would keep Medicare solvent until 2006, while a bipartisan committee devises a long-term plan. Options for relief, however, are limited to increasing revenues by raising premiums and copayments or by decreasing spending.
This study defines a company's quality orientation as "all process-related activities that can be discerned by customers." This even includes certain processes internal to the company that can be seen and evaluated by customers. One significant contribution this study provides is scale development centered on customer rather than employee perceptions. To generate scale items, input was gathered from experts involved in the study, senior managers employed with the target company, focus groups of employees working on the front line with customers, and users of the services. Because the sale measures customer perceptions of quality in comparison with the firm's closest competitor, it provides managers with information for benchmarking performance relative to others in the marketplace.
Glaxo's Zantac began its dominance of the acid/peptic marketplace with a launch strategy, taking advantage of the established Roche sales force to rapidly promote the product. Educational symposia for physicians were instrumental in disseminating both disease and product information to primary care physicians and specialists. This technique not only pleased physicians (more referrals), but also increased public awareness of gastrointestinal disease, further expanding the patient market. Several novel marketing strategies contributed to Zantac's success, including the public-service announcements, celebrity media tours, and consumer-awareness bulletins, which brought the drug to the lay public and encouraged individuals to seek advice from their physicians.
Given the manner in which the Internet permeates today's society, it is easy to forget that the Internet as we know it is only about a decade old. Due to its newness, the Internet has provided an opportunity to view the manner in which marketers move to adopt such an innovation. To that end, since 1995 a series of studies has tracked the adoption and use of the Internet by hospital marketers. In addition to simply investigating the number of hospitals that utilize the Internet in their marketing efforts, the studies have addressed such questions as: How are hospitals using the Internet to market themselves?, What roadblocks have held hospitals back from adopting the Internet as a marketing tool?, and How happy are hospitals with their Internet investment? This manuscript details the most recent in this series of research studies. In addition, the authors compare the results of this study, conducted in the fall of 2002, with the results from the previous studies. As a result, this study provides a unique opportunity to observe the actual adoption of an innovation, the Internet, by hospital marketing professionals.
