The Impact of Marketing Strategies in Private Hospitals’ Out-Patient Department Design

Abstract

Private hospitals are private healthcare institutions and business entities that provide medical services. Private hospitals can lighten the workload of public hospitals, and be an alternative to consumers with sufficient purchasing power. The operating budget of a private hospital is high. Therefore, executive boards have to set their marketing strategy in line with their business context and identity. For example, determining the following potential consumers with sufficient purchasing power as their target customers: urban residents, social security insurers, or foreigners. Moreover, each strategic marketing planning has to involve custom-made customer attraction techniques. This results in a variety of marketing strategies across the private healthcare industry.

            It has been found that private hospitals distinguish their main target customers into three groups: general customers, customers who are insured by social security, and foreign customers. The out-patient department for general customers focuses on privacy and comfort, resulting in decentralized waiting area design in ​​16.34-19.01 square meters per exam room, which is higher than hospitals serving social security insurer. There are both centralized and decentralized waiting areas in ​​12.02-15.38 square meters per examination room.

Private hospitals serving social security have a social security department which combined examination rooms for all disease group in an area and located separately from other outpatient departments. Also, a hospital which included foreign as their target group have separate outpatient reception area for foreign customers. The proportion of the waiting area to the examination room of the social security department, general outpatient department and the foreigner customer department is 14.14, 14.38 and 31.20 square meters per examination room. The size of the examination room of the social security department, general outpatient department and the foreigner customer department is 12.10, 14.35 and 22.5 square meters per examination room respectively.

Moreover, private hospitals also have other marketing strategies such as concentrate on specific medical specialties to attract customers and indicate a high standard of service. As a result, the specialized department area design to have more ample space with decentralized waiting area to separate areas for patients with common diseases and patients with specific diseases. The specialized examination room is different from the general examination room.

From the results of the study, it was concluded that a private hospital's marketing policy in the field of hospital planning, target customers, target staffs, medical specialty and measures to reduce unnecessary expenses influences the physical design of the private hospital's outpatient department area such as the size of the facility area, as well as the planning of waiting areas, examination rooms, treatment rooms, circulation system, and support areas.