Dealing with ‘LIVES’ – How to cultivate Your hospital as the TRUSTED HEALTH CARE PARTNER?
Well,
Dear Friends, this is an effort.
We as Hospital Marketeers are always dealing with ‘LIVES’
This is the fact of our life as Hospital Marketing professionals. May it be patients, our doctors, our staff our management we are dealing with Human Lives who have sentiments and feelings. We as hospital marketeers need to understand that whilst we are process of building trust factor that eventually generates business for our hospital, we should at no stage knowing or unknowingly hurt or scar any of these LIVES.
For us these LIVES create the very Brand Value of the Hospital in short, the TRUST.
Creating trust with anyone itself is a challenge, creating TRUST about MEDICAL HEALTH CARE is an even TOUGHER CHALLENGE.
However, we are here to study how do we overcome challenges and move forward in field of Hospital Marketing.
Creating TRUST is a process and it cannot be done overnight or in a few days. It requires quite a lot of learning and unlearning, adopting new approach and realigning earlier approach etc.
We will learn all that in the course of time.
“Nothing will work unless you do”
Maya Angelou, who was a prominent American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist has quoted “Nothing will work unless you do”.
It means that to make something work you yourself need to work towards it.
Here we are working towards creating TRUST Factor and that to happen you first need to trust your hospital, its abilities and capabilities and more importantly your firm approach and thought process.
Following are the steps a Hospital Marketeer needs to take whilst creating the Trust factor for his or her hospital:
- Learn Your Hospital:
Yes!!! You have to learn your hospital as you have learned for your educational qualifications. A few important points that you should know by heart:
- Values the hospital is based upon
- On what basis has the vision and mission of the hospital has been created
- Doctors on Panel and their qualifications
- Doctors who admitting their cases to your hospital on regular basis
- Diagnostic facilities, instruments in OPD, IPD and OT such has X Ray system, MRI, CT, Sonography, Endoscopes, Microscopes, Cath Lab system etc.
- Paramedical staff abilities and capabilities
- General Staff capabilities and abilities
- Hospital structure – meaning on which floor is which department etc
- Roads that give easy access to the hospital from airport, railway station, bus stands and other important locations of the local city.
- Geographical location of the hospital in terms of Residential or Industrial zone
- Socio Economic status of the people residing in the vicinity of the hospital
- Spending mentality of near vicinity and city residents
Above mentioned are few points apart from them the most important and primary point to be learnt is what is the current perspective of the hospital (of course it is for hospitals that are established for a few years)
This in-depth knowledge of your own hospital will give you the confidence to decide your approach towards the market. A Marketeer faces various markets right from an individual to corporate to medical fraternity itself (doctors and other medical institutions), hence his speech will differ for each set of markets.
Whilst it is important to learn your hospital, it is also important that you also understand the local and current market scenario. A marketeer has to take into consideration the internal and external factors that will affect the projection of his hospital.
Today, I have highlighted the first step of the process towards creating TURST factor for your hospital.
Watch out for my next Sunday segment that will list out the further set of processes that a Hospital Marketeer can adopt to cultivate profound trust for his hospital for its effective consumer base. I will be explaining the concept of External and Internal Customer and how do we go about handling them both.
Let us meet next Sunday…
Darshan Deokule's Blog 