Studying Healthcare from a Marketing Perspective

Studying Healthcare from a Marketing Perspective is forward-looking and reflects on issues where marketers could have greater impact and use their potential roles to further improving health care. This monograph is intended to be practical and useful, and with all suggestions and recommendations deriving from solid theory. These topics are useful for healthcare administrators, providers, marketers, and other practitioners in this industry, along with academics who are interested in contributing to healthcare research. Section 2 begins with a brief description of several relevant and applicable theoretical perspectives. These conceptual frameworks have been applied to many kinds of human behavior, and we will implement them as relevant to healthcare decision-making and consumer behavior. In the sections that follow, we then draw from these concepts because they provide validated grounding in offering suggestions that certain marketing actions should be effective in modifying healthcare behaviors and improving healthcare outcomes. Section 3 discusses healthcare issues for individual consumers, such as lifestyle choices and how marketers influence more beneficial decision-making. Section 4 discusses dyadic healthcare phenomena involving the consumers (patients) together with another actor such as their healthcare provider or other system entities such as their insurance company and payers. Section 5 reviews the numerous organizations representing the many industries that converge on health care provision and support. Section 6 provides a societal perspective regarding health care and welfare more generally. Section 7 offers conclusions, and the monograph closes with an Appendix that presents a brief summary of the marketing research literature on health care.