Assessing the impact of hospital marketing in attracting the patient for service consumption in tertiary care hospital in central India.

Introduction

Hospital service is a field that is constantly updating, with the availability of creativity, chances motivating passion, and allowing experts to thrive. Hospital marketing is a scientific discipline since it uses concepts, plans, and methods that are exclusive to both conventional and social marketing. There are marketplaces and services, but there are no monetary equivalents in healthcare marketing, which makes it unique. The depiction of a healthy community, the identification of a group of chronically ill individuals, the certainty that sick individuals receive adequate medical care by undergoing the entire rehabilitation program, the professional and social reintegration of patients, etc., are examples of how its application is practical. The need for marketing in the healthcare industry originated from worries about society's health. An effective marketing plan includes a detailed analysis of the patient's needs, the identification of latent expectations, and introducing novel healthcare services that sick people have not directly requested. Healthcare professionals may help to develop their target market, engage with it, and provide value to it. New marketers begin with the client rather than the goods or facilities. They focus more on creating a long-lasting connection than completing a single transaction. They aim for excellent customer satisfaction because they want customers to continue doing business with the same provider. Marketers have traditionally employed various techniques, such as promotional products, market analysis, pricing, product creation, advertising, and distribution.¹

Marketing tools are an essential consideration in this situation. The effectiveness of the healthcare system as a whole is significantly impacted by marketing. For instance, branding a hospital as a supplier of specialized services signals a change in focus for customers. Still, it also impacts the executives, doctors, and staff that make the hospital run and its role in the community. Promotional initiatives also impact healthcare systems by affecting how the general public views healthcare issues and objectives. Marketing may have a significant effect on the medical system by serving as a crucial conduit linking customers and healthcare providers and encouraging the dissemination of health information. Healthcare marketing really affects costumer’s behaviour and significantly affects how well the healthcare system runs.²

Quality of service in healthcare is characterized as a discrepancy between patient views and standards. The definition of service quality is the customer's total perception or appraisal of the business and its services relative inadequacy or superiority. It may be calculated by comparing consumers' hopes with their views of the real performance of the service. Before using the services, customers build their expectations. Individuals form impressions during the service delivery process, and when assessing the conclusion of the service encounter, they contrast their views with their expectations. Service quality implies that the customer's needs and expectations should be met during service delivery and suggests that patients judge a hospital's service quality based on its service output, service procedure, and physical surroundings. This is because service quality is thought to satisfy patients' demands.³

Novel marketing tactics used by private hospitals to promote their facilities are explored, as are sample hospitals managed by various corporate managements, using the 7Ps of marketing, which stand for place, product, promotion, people, physical evidence, pricing, and process.

By creating guiding principles and moral standards, bioethics aims to define the therapeutic activity and any other associated activity required to keep a healthcare institution operating. The field of bioethics is quite broad and has a history encompassing several academic fields, including sociology, theology, law, philosophy, and medicine. The approach to build and sustain connections with the target customer includes advertising and marketing (patients). It was required to create ethical guidelines for healthcare marketing in order to control this activity. Promotional messaging needs to be truthful and avoid setting up false expectations. The hospital or the doctor must be able to provide the services listed in the advertisement. While marketing information aims to draw attention to more intriguing topics, it should still be more grounded in reality. In this context, it is important to identify the groups and subcategories that are more receptive to different aspects of the advertising message. A client who is in severe pain will be easily swayed and have a great motive to get better. The information presented must not misrepresent reality or offer patients false hope to be ethical.⁵ New, creative applications are giving branding a newfound prominence. Even though there have been times when branding hasn't worked, marketers are starting to identify the right situations where it operates. The choice of a brand name is one of today's branding strategy issues and concerns. The effectiveness of a branding plan will be impacted by this underlying problem.⁶ Since these communities may aid in understanding customer requirements and in fostering brand loyalty and involvement, they have developed into a potent tool for marketers. This paper attempts to investigate how consumers can be persuaded to participate in online communities in this regard by analysing the impact of involvement in virtual communities on consumer commitment.⁷ Branding is the process by which a firm or organization becomes unique in the eyes of its customers. The achievement of any business depends on its ability to create and manage a brand, encompassing its name, reputation, and identity. A firm's branding and the degree to which customers connect to its brand dictate how, where, and when it engages with its customers. The company's most robust differentiation in the market now is its branding.⁸ There is no evidence indicating that using advertising campaigns to influence the worldwide public's views of an entire city, region, or country is anything more than a vain and irrational waste of taxpayers' money. Marketing communications are acceptable when the task is simply one of selling a product, and the product can just as easily be the vacation resorts or potential investment possibilities of a nation as the goods of a corporation.⁹

Methods

This will be a quantitative cross sectional retrospective study. It includes a collection of secondary data and information direct from the marketing department and software of marketing department. This study will be conducted in the tertiary care hospital of central India. Duration of this study will be three months.

Results

The expected result of the study will be to bridge the gap by providing the corrective information and developing the relationship between patient and hospital, to create a leadership position and differentiate from competitors.

Discussion

In their study, Mark J. Kay in the USA, stated that to compare and contrasts the customer (or patient) viewpoint with the organizational perspective to generate a view on what is ‘salient’ or vital to the healthcare marketing’s sector.² The structural issues in healthcare, such as social service systems, technological advancements in medicine, and rising healthcare expenses, aggravate this ‘salience dilemma’. The report reviews a few studies and examines how customers face more challenging health decisions.²

According to the Chao-Chan Wu study, their findings show that patient loyalty is influenced by hospital brand image both directly and indirectly.³ This indicates that a strong hospital brand not only fosters customers’ loyalty directly but also boosts patient happiness by elevating the perceived quality of service, encouraging patients to repeat. Moreover, a hospital's brand image is a leading determinant in patient experience, improving service quality, and patient loyalty. The results also point to the importance of the link between service quality and patient satisfaction in influencing patient loyalty to healthcare institutions. This study suggests that to improve loyalty, service quality and patient happiness, hospital management should work to establish and maintain a positive brand image of the healthcare institute. This study also makes some recommendations about the development and upkeep of a positive hospital brand image.³

According to Garnick et al., the study stated that an example can be used to show the varied definitions of hospital market areas.¹⁰ As a single-county, Fresno County, where Fresno Community Hospital is located, has 12 additional hospitals inside its borders. Seven hospitals can be found within a 15-mile range of Fresno Community Hospital. Five healthcare institutions admit at least 5% of their patients from the census tracts that make up to 60% of admissions to the Fresno Community. All five hospitals fall within a 15-mile radius. The area of that organization, the 15-mile group, and the able to-share origin cluster each has 12–14 hospitals from a commercial standpoint.¹⁰

According to the Wani et al., study, despite efforts to improve the healthcare of the Indian populace, the circumstances wasn’t same as before.¹¹ It is ironic that while spending a disproportionately significant portion of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health, India's results are average. The Declaration and Fundamental Principles of the Indian Constitution constantly stress the need for an ‘equal society’, which includes the government's obligation to provide basic healthcare.¹¹