Strategic marketing in cardiac care

Abstract

The project aims at articulating a marketing strategy for an upcoming corporate multispecialty hospital. Salient features of operations too have been mentioned where they were necessary to impart a sense of comprehensiveness to the report. Marketing of medical services is a complex activity, given that marketing hospitals sometimes has negative connotations. Further, medical services are rarely seen as customer centric services. In formulating this strategy, thought was given to the changing Indian medical services consumer. It was felt that importance needs to be given to getting as customer centric as possible, while still giving due regard to the humane element of the healthcare business. The changing nature of the Indian medical services consumer, particularly in the target segment, was studied to aid in the decision making process for service design (kind of medical services offered, format of hospital, etc.).Considering that lifestyle diseases (hypertension, diabetes, cardiac diseases and stress) are increasingly common, and also that almost all these lead to cardiac complications, the proposed hospital would be a multi-specialty one with a focus on cardiac care. Another compulsion for this is that in India, there are a large number of undetected cardiac cases. Various approaches of promoting cardiac care have been dealt with such as? Direct patient contact? Referral doctors based expansion? Media promotion For a large hospital, the operating model is an integral part of the service design as it directly affects the consumer base the hospital targets. For this reason, the operating model has been covered in some detail in this report. In designing the operating model, the focus has been on scalability and standardization. It has been assumed that world class healthcare at a cost commensurate to service level is an inherent need of the consumer, with no tolerance on quality of healthcare.