Healthcare Marketing: Then, Now, and Why It Matters

Before modern healthcare, doctors would often gain business by simply being within proximity of a town or city that required healthcare. Some would become traveling doctors to offer their services where outbreaks of disease or injury were known to occur, while others would gain reputations through word of mouth and make house calls for a living.

By and large, these practices are obsolete thanks to the existence of modern healthcare. With greater availability, access, and credibility than your average sawbones, the model of healthcare as a business quickly dominated smaller practitioners due in part to healthcare marketing.

Image via Flickr

Like any business, healthcare is an industry in which marketing is necessary. While doctors, nurses, and every other professional outside of marketing departments may not feel that it’s ever necessary to market their work nowadays, recognizing the role that marketing principles play in healthcare in the past and today provides invaluable perspective.

Marketing and Today’s Healthcare

For example, while the obvious goal of marketing is to create business leads, the concepts of demographic profiling has informed how healthcare is delivered tremendously. Consider how advertisers gather data about consumers regularly in order to cater to their interests, like when we receive customized ads according to our online habits and location.

Likewise, health informatics professionals can use tools such as computer algorithms, data mining, and modeling to determine how to personalize the administration of healthcare. Comparing personal information with trends can help best identify, prevent, and treat conditions and illnesses.

Excerpt of UIC’s infographic, “When Healthcare and Computer Science Collide”

While informatics professionals also conduct clinical trials and medical studies, much of their work feeds directly into clinical decision-making that affects doctors and nurses on a daily basis — and by using the same basic research tools that advertisers use to tempt us into buying a box of Cheerios.

Becoming Your Own Marketer

On a personal level, we can use marketing principles to become advocates for our own professional lives, enhancing our network and engaging with employers and colleagues to promote our future success. This was necessary before organized healthcare took care of finding clientele; but even today, failing to promote yourself as a professional can damage your outlook.

Too often, medical professionals leave it up to their employers to market their services alone, which can be disempowering when it comes to making career decisions. But through social media, any nurse or doctor can interact with peers and patients in a manner that promotes credibility, an expanded network, and most importantly leverage as a well-regarded professional.

Courtesy of SumAll

When it comes to salary negotiations or finding a new employer, leverage is invaluable. Not only will your presence generate interest in your services, but employers will recognize you more as an authority within the healthcare industry.

Here’s a guide from Maryville University that outlines some best practices for multiple popular social media platforms when it comes to how nurses can leverage social media to expand their professional careers. The University of Arizona’s College of Nursing provides a specific guide for LinkedIn practices for nurses here, which is the favored social media site for professionals.

While it easy to forget the value that marketing has for medical professionals, it provides value to us every day by allowing us to better understand patients to improve healthcare on the whole. And with a little effort, marketing ourselves can enhance our professional lives as well. While healthcare will always exist for the general welfare of the people cared for, understanding how marketing practices influence the industry can make a world of difference in your professional development.