Healthcare Marketing
Marketing is essential for all health care companies, including Banner Health. This company is a non-profit provider based in Arizona with operations around the Southwest. In a competitive marketplace, all health care companies need to find ways to attract both payers and patients to their business. Payers are important because there are some payment models are based on whether a provider is in a given network or not. Being able to attract individual patients can also be quite useful, especially customers who are cash payers. An example of how important marketing is can be seen with the facility that Banner recently built in Boulder, CO. That community was already well-served with another provider (Armbrister, 20120. What this meant was that while Banner could expect some business based on the growth of the community, it should also have had a strategy to both win patients away from the existing facility and to attract them to the area, perhaps drawing from other communities within an hour or so.
Marketing has a direct impact also in terms of directing people to specific alternatives. Banner can, for example, market a specific procedure, and literally convince the customer to seek out that procedure as a solution, having already established some level of trust in Banner and having already established that Banner has excellence at that procedure. This type of approach allows companies in health care to focus their marketing efforts on the sort...
This information can help management with its strategic decision-making function. The first thing in the plan is that the company has to understand what its objectives are. That is what will guide this entire process. For example, if the company wants to improve its capacity utilization, or if it wants to improve its revenue per bed. The second step is to determine what measures it wants to utilization. The third step is to find ways to measure those things.
When this is done, the company will have e better idea of what its utilization is. There are a lot of ways to look at this issue. The provider may be curious about the breakdown of its market by payer, or by condition, or by geography. There are many different ways for a business to understand its market. IN particular, when the market is competitive and not every area is profitable, the provider needs to understand on what services it makes money and on what services it does not. Knowing these things will help it to make better decisions about its capability utilization going forward. But the strategy for understanding utilization depends on determining what the best measures are, and how those things can be measure d -- gathering data is an important…
