Physician leadership
Concepts in service marketing for healthcare professionals

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-9610(00)00535-3Get rights and content

Abstract

Patients are becoming increasingly involved in making healthcare choices as their burden of healthcare costs continues to escalate. At the same time, healthcare has entered a tightened market economy. For these reasons, the marketing of healthcare services has become essential for the financial survival of physicians and healthcare organizations. Physicians can successfully use the fundamental service marketing principles proven by other service industries to win patient satisfaction and loyalty and remain competitive in today’s market economy. Understanding concepts such as service quality zone of tolerance, levels of consumer satisfaction, the branding of services, patient participation, and service recovery can be useful in achieving these goals.

Section snippets

Services versus commodities

Services have four unique characteristics that differentiate them from commodities, namely, intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability. Services are intangible in that they do not take on a physical form. In addition, services generally cannot be counted, measured, tested, or thoroughly evaluated before consumption [5]. Thus, consumer perceptions and satisfaction are based solely on the perceived performance and outcome of the service. Secondly, services are heavily reliant

Service quality

Healthcare providers can no longer market only clinical outcomes; patients are demanding supportive services in addition to the treatment of their illnesses. Patients have preconceived desires about the level of service they should receive; conversely, they also have a minimal level of adequacy that they are willing to accept. The difference between these levels of desired service and adequate service is considered the zone of tolerance (Fig. 1)[6]. The zone of tolerance is conceptualized on

Other marketing outcomes

As competition increases for patient market share, it becomes increasingly important for healthcare professionals to provide high quality healthcare service experiences. As service quality improves, patient satisfaction will tend to improve as well, and will move towards its highest level, delight. Levels of appreciation have evolved over the years and the chart in Fig. 2 shows one model that targets customer service appreciation. The progression inward toward customer delight is more than

Branding

Branding of goods and services has become pervasive throughout the marketplace. Brands can serve as a signal of consistency and in a sense “control the customer experience from start to finish”[9]. As in virtually every aspect of service marketing, healthcare organizations and physician practices are lagging behind other service industries in the practice of branding. Branding of healthcare services can provide a platform whereby consumers can view their service encounter as the purchase of a

Patients versus customers

At first, the differences between the words patient and customer appear to be one of semantics only; however, the difference runs deeper than that. The labels of patient and customer connote very different sets of behavioral expectations for the individuals involved. Individuals labeled as customers may be more likely to “shop around” to find the best deal, may be more likely to question the decisions of the medical professionals involved in their care, and may hold very different expectations

Patient participation

The physician-patient relationship that is built on shared intimacy and trust is unusually strong compared to relationships between other types of service providers and their customers. Because of the nature of clinical services, patients are fundamental participants in their care and, consequently, play an important role in determining healthcare service outcomes. Studies show that when a service relationship is positive, it promotes loyalty, cooperation, and participation with the service

Patient loyalty

Traditionally, healthcare organizations have failed to acknowledge the need to build and develop long-term patient-provider relationships. The focus, to date, has been on discrete encounters, defined by Gutek et al [14] as “single interactions between a customer and provider; neither expects to interact with the other in the future.”

Healthcare professionals probably underestimate the lifetime value of a loyal patient. A patient and his primary care physician probably have many encounters during

Patient defection

Another important element of service marketing as it relates to healthcare involves the antithesis of patient loyalty and long-term patient-provider relationships—patient defection. Patient defection may sound benign, but the financial effect suffered by an organization that has a high level of patient defection is enormous. A patient defector is modestly defined as a patient who does not return for services. Unlike lost patrons of a restaurant or automotive repair shop, patient defectors of

Service recovery

Mistakes do happen in all types industries, including the healthcare service industry. These mistakes are often referred to as service failures. Service failures in the healthcare industry range in severity from mishaps involving clinical errors to something as common as an excessive wait for service. Although they sound like typical everyday occurrences and merely a part of the service transaction, patients may soon begin to take notice and become defectors of the organization as a result of

Moods

Unfortunately for the healthcare industry, most people generally do not look forward to visiting their doctor. Furthermore, most patients are typically unhappy about the prospect of the healthcare service encounter. Moods have been demonstrated to have a significant impact on evaluations. Specifically, when individuals are in positive moods they tend to formulate more positive evaluations of situations and events [18]. This presents an interesting situation for healthcare professionals. It

Conclusion

Arguably the purest form of a service industry and, certainly, the largest such industry at present, healthcare clinical delivery has advanced dramatically over the last 50 years in terms of the technical areas of procedure and delivery in order to meet the needs of patients. Nevertheless, it has not been until the past decade that healthcare organizations, as well as individual physicians, have widely recognized the need to market their services. Managed care cost containment initiatives,

References (18)

  • L. Bettencourt

    Customer voluntary performancecustomers as partners in service delivery

    J Retail

    (1997)
  • Kelley S. Marketing in services and nonprofit organizations. Interview, January 2000. Personal...
  • R. Hertzlinger

    Market driven health care

    (1997)
  • van der Werff TJ. Health-care planning. Washington CEO 1995;6(5): http://www.washingtonceo.com/archive/may95/index.html...
  • H.C. Wagner et al.

    Relationship marketing in health careafter being disillusioned by marketing, hospital finds a focused approach contributes to bottom line

    J Health Care Market

    (1994)
  • A. Parasuraman et al.

    A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research

    J Market

    (1985)
  • V. Zeithaml et al.

    The nature and determinants of customer expectations and service

    J Acad Market Sci

    (1993)
  • A. Parasuraman et al.

    SERVQUALa multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality

    J Retail

    (1988)
  • H. Rabinowitz et al.

    A program to increase the number of family physicians in rural and underserved areasimpact after 22 years

    JAMA

    (1999)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (59)

  • The Other Side of the Tracks

    2022, Year One of Practice Transition: The Necessary Guide to Success
  • An integrated socio-technical approach for post-earthquake recovery of interdependent healthcare system

    2020, Reliability Engineering and System Safety
    Citation Excerpt :

    Reputation of the healthcare facility will also affect patient selection. Social media, previous experience of the patient and brand name can dramatically change the patient's choice [46]. The connection between patient and healthcare facility is critical especially in the case of earthquake hazard, in which transportation network functionality can be affected and the patient's travel time to the healthcare facility can significantly increase [15].

  • Patient-centered care: factors associated with reporting a positive experience at United States fertility clinics

    2020, Fertility and Sterility
    Citation Excerpt :

    Health care providers can no longer market only clinical outcomes; patients are demanding supportive services in addition to the treatment of their illnesses (66). It is increasingly important for fertility clinics to provide high-quality health care service experiences as well as high-quality care (66). By identifying factors that are associated with patients reporting PPE, clinics may be able to optimize the patient experience and improve the quality of infertility care that they provide.

  • The change of pediatric surgery practice due to the emergence of connected health technologies

    2019, Technological Forecasting and Social Change
    Citation Excerpt :

    We found that the patients' parents gained a more active and essential role in their children's treatment throughout the process, especially in the pre-surgery and rehabilitation phases by using citizen-centric connected health solutions. Many studies have noted that in the future, patients will be more interactive partners of healthcare and will become more responsible for the efficiency of their treatment (Corbin et al., 2001; Kinnunen et al., 2016; Lamprinos et al., 2016). In our case, we also found that the patient empowerment achieved through family-driven connected health solutions would improve and transform the daily tasks of current agents.

  • How to best manage time interaction with patients? Community pharmacist workload and service provision analysis

    2017, Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy
    Citation Excerpt :

    If this was not perceivable, the observer asked the professional afterward whether or not the person was a regular customer. Customer loyalty and patient retention are essential to build trust between patients and their health care providers, which is essential to a longitudinal provision of quality services.47 Assessing customer regularity will help to establish the potential of longitudinal pharmacy services in the management of chronic patients.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text