Abstract
Background: Marketing mix in hospitals and healthcare organizations predispose medical needs, gain market share and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these centers. This study aimed to prioritize the effective marketing mix elements on patients’ tendency to the hospitals using analytic hierarchy process (AHP).
Materials and methods: This is a descriptive and applied study. The required data were collected by a paired comparisons questionnaire. Twelve experts in the field of health services were chosen and their viewpoints analyzed by AHP with the Expert Choice 11 software.
Results: The prioritization of the main factors from experts viewpoints showed that in public hospitals, price (0.386), services (0.358), physical assets (0.306), place (0.305), process management (0.302), people (0.294), and promotion (0.287); and in private hospitals, services (0.373), physical assets (0.335), promotion (0.327), place (0.318), process management (0.314), people (0.308) and price (0.255) were placed in grade first to seventh, respectively.
Conclusion: Considering the key role of services marketing mix elements in patients’ tendency to hospitals, experts’ viewpoints were assessed carefully, and the main elements of marketing mix and their parameters were ranked based on their importance.
Disclaimer statements
Contributors Both the authors have an equal participation role in this research: conceiving and designing the study, obtaining funding and/or ethics approval, collecting the data, analyzing the data, interpreting the data, writing the article in whole or in part, and revising the article.
Funding None.
Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.
Ethics approval We approve that everything reported in this manuscript is true, and every participant in this research was informed the aim and scope of research.