Healthcare marketing: Contemporary salient issues and future research directions

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discern the current salient issues in healthcare marketing by looking at the perspective of healthcare consumers and providers, and providing a scope of marketing prospects and opportunities for healthcare improvement as an avenue for future research, as well as guiding how scholars could obtain relevant healthcare data which may be useful for future write-ups on the subject. A review of existing journals in the healthcare and marketing scholarship under the ERA 2010 List of Journals was conducted. We examine the salient issues in healthcare marketing from the patient and healthcare provider perspective. Following the review, we examine what future research is required to solve these issues. Notably, salient issues concerning patients revolve around healthcare quality, dissatisfaction, cognitive dissonance, anxiety, ambiguity or uncertainty, and the lack of control, and the concerns of healthcare providers were in terms of mutation of medical focus, rising cost of medical procedures, and escalading numbers of healthcare providers. Our findings indicate six areas of future research to overcome the identified salient issues – improving patient satisfaction, identifying trends in satisfaction–loyalty relations, effective targeting, health promotion, medical tourism, and looking beyond the brick and mortar context for possible healthcare marketing solutions.

Keywords:

• Marketing
• Patients
• Providers
• Satisfaction
• Targeting
• Promotion
• Medical tourism
• e-healthcare

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Sixth International Conference of the Global Academy of Business and Economic Research in New York, USA, in October 2010 and has won the Best Paper Award. This work was completed with both authors associated with Monash University. However, only the abstract was published in the conference proceedings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Weng Marc Lim

Weng Marc Lim is attached with the School of Business, Monash University. His research interests are in healthcare, management information systems, environmental sustainability, consumer behaviour, hospitality and tourism. Lim can be contacted at [email protected].

Ding Hooi Ting

Ding Hooi Ting is attached with the School of Business, Monash University. His research interests are in services marketing, customer behaviour and education. Ting can be contacted at [email protected].