Healthcare Marketing

Abstract

The healthcare sector contains hospitals, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, telemedicine, medical tourism, health insurance, clinical trials, and medical equipment. The sector has witnessed tremendous growth owing to an increase in lifestyle diseases, growing demand for reasonably priced healthcare delivery, technological advancements, health insurance penetration, and initiatives of the government like incremental public health spending, e-health, and expenditure by private players on innovative healthcare service delivery models. Besides, medical service consumers have become more conscious of their healthcare upkeep and their rights. With such advancements, the healthcare market has not only shown incremental compound annual growth rate (CAGR) but has also necessitated inevitable structural changes in the system of healthcare delivery and the competitive ecosystem in which they operate. This needs a different marketing approach whereby highly segmented and targeted online and offline tactics and multichannel presence are emphasized to drive patient engagement and the attainment of organization goals of multifarious service areas of health care. This chapter explains how these concepts of marketing can be used to design and promote healthcare services. The first part of the chapter introduces the concept of marketing in health care and how it requires a distinctive approach to marketing strategy—both in its development and execution to create value-based health care. The next part of the chapter deals with core marketing concepts, i.e., how consumers take their healthcare decisions, how market information can be gathered, and how healthcare organizations segment, target, and distinctively position their products and services in the marketplace. The latter part describes steps of designing the strategic market plan to deliver quality services with the help of marketing mix available to healthcare providers, i.e., product and service design, branding, pricing, place, and communication with their application for developing a customer-focused approach in the adoption of health behaviors and practices.