Market Orientation and Healthcare Case

Market Orientation and Healthcare Case Study

What do you think about the Market Orientation of the community hospital?

The market orientation of the hospital shows how powerful creating marketing strategies and services based on demographic and psychographically-based segmentation. The hospital broke out of the traditional approach to segmented marketing by getting beyond just publishing their literature in the different languages however. They focused on getting actual members of the communities, fellow Koreans, Middle Eastern, Muslim (Middle Eastern, Pakistani, and Indian), and Hispanic healthcare professionals to host the events. This underscored the commitment the hospital has to these specific nationalities and made the services being offered less sterile and remote, more personal and focused on individual needs. By doing this, the hospital was providing services entirely driven by the consumers' needs for cultural and medical support, which is a critical success factor in marketing medical services to ethnic groups (Hughes-Cromwick, Root, Roehrig, 2007).

Another factor is the completeness with which these programs were designed and implemented. Instead of just relying on brochures in native languages or the development of an 800 number in a given language, the company provided medical experts in each area, which further created trust. The delivery of regional medical expertise to the personal level provides useful guidance, and can transform a medical provider into a trusted advisor over the long-term (Wrenn, 2006). At the most fundamental level the decision on the part of the hospital to create the individualized tours and discussions, each in the language specific to each segments' needs and cultural preferences, created a very high level of trust. This aspect of becoming the trusted advisor to these segments was the catalyst of the positive change to the overall direction of the hospital's treatment programs being accepted across such diverse ethnic audiences.

2. What do you think created the change?

First, it was the consideration of the unique cultural needs and requirements of each ethnic nationality that led to the change. Creating trust by showing respect and appreciation for these differences overall also led to significant increase in the overall level of adoption of healthcare services by nationality. As the hospital focused on the unique and highly specific needs of each segment of their customer population, they were able to create a stable and strong platform for future growth over time (Balloun, Weinstein, 2009). Trust, authenticity and transparency are ancillary values of being so focused on the unique needs of each segment of the markets the hospital serves. These attributes taken together (authenticity, transparency and trust) taken together can lead to a significant shift in the leadership levels of the healthcare provider, shifting from being one of many considered for healthcare to being the leader in healthcare across served segments by attaining a high level of trust with patients (Balloun, Weinstein, 2009).

3. How the quality of service changed and why?

The quality of service increased significantly as all practices areas of the hospital better aligned to the cultural norms, values and needs of each ethnic population represented by the segments served. The quality also increased because the staff also began to better understand the unique needs of the patients being served, with more emphasis on interpersonal communication than had been the case in the past. This personalization aspect of leadership works both ways; the hospital staff had a much better appreciation and understanding of the unique needs of the population they were serving, and the potential patients and customers developed familiarity and trust with the providers. The next step for the hospital is to create a means to continually evaluate the level of satisfaction they are delivering to patients. The hospital could use the SERVQUAL metrics to evaluate the level of satisfaction they are delivering to patients over time for example to benchmark overall performance (Ravichandran, Prabhakaran, Kumar, 2010).