Question

What are two changes to the market for health services you would recommend to increase efficiency in the market for health services and make the market more competitive?

Answer 1

The dynamic evolution of life has inevitably affected the healthcare systems generating significant changes and imposing healthcare marketing as an indispensable element of health brands. Healthcare is a field in a permanent evolution, the plethora of opportunities stimulating creativity, enthusiasm, and will exploit the specialists in the field.Through its specificity, healthcare marketing is an interdisciplinary field because it uses certain concepts, methods, and techniques specific both to classical and social marketing. The specificity of healthcare marketing is that there are services and markets but no money equivalent. This means the effectiveness of its application can be found in the image of a healthy population, the detection of a chronically ill category of people, ensuring the treatment of ill people by going through the whole rehabilitation process.At the same time, the marketing mix strategy is necessary in medical organizations to ensure their success. Thus, the strategy leads to a significant impact on the medical organization, including its performance measured by patient satisfaction, the co-ordination of planned marketing efforts to address organizational performance being essential.Over the past decade, healthcare has experienced many marketing trends that have fundamentally altered marketing. These trends are the follows:

-- From a mass marketing approach to a more specific approach.

— From image marketing to service marketing.

— From “one measure for all” to personalization.

— From the emphasis on a health episode to a long-lasting relationship.

— From “ignoring” the market, to market intelligence.

— From low-tech to high-tech

Marketing plays an important role in helping healthcare professionals to create, communicate, and provide value to their target market. Modern marketers start from customers rather than from products or services. They are more interested in building a sustainable relationship, than in ensuring a single transaction. Their aim is to create a high level of consumer satisfaction so that they return to the same supplier. Marketers have used many traditional methods that include marketing research, product design, distribution, pricing, advertising, promotional sales, and sales management. These methods need to be joined by new ones, related to new technology and new concepts, to attract customers through messages and offers.A competitive health market occurs when there are numerous producers that compete with one another in hopes to provide the goods and services we as consumers want and need. In doing so, they fulfill five major characteristics: profit, diminishability, rivalry, excludability, and rejectability.In all industries, competition among businesses has long been encouraged as a mechanism to increase value for patients. In other words, competition ensures the provision of better products and services to satisfy the needs of customers This paper aims to develop a model that can be used to empirically investigate a number of complex issues and relationships associated with competition in the health care industry. Various perspectives of competition, the nature of service quality, health system costs, and patient satisfaction in health care are examined.Why many of these specialty hospitals are not efficient is not clear. Carey et al. surmise that it may be related to a trade-off in office versus hospital efficiencies. For example, particularly because many specialty hospitals are also physician-owned, efforts to be efficient may focus on setting operating room schedules for surgeons’ convenience and workload, rather than on minimizing hospital inefficiencies in resource use. This raises the general question, how exactly do physicians respond to physician productivity incentives?Here are five steps primary care providers can take right now to improve quality healthcare for their patients:

Collect Data and Analyze Patient Outcomes.

Set Goals and Commit to Ongoing Evaluation.

Improve Access to Care.

Focus on Patient Engagement.

Connect and Collaborate With Other Organizations.