Like users of music streaming apps, first and foremost, consumers will use price comparisons across hospitals to inform their decisions on where to seek care. As in certain areas where patients are already responsible for paying the entire cost of a medical bill, such as LASIK procedures or cosmetic surgery, providers are used to cutting prices to attract larger patient populations who pursue different providers based largely on price.
In addition to price, consumers are more engaged in comparing hospitals’ quality and safety ratings. For instance, the Leapfrog Group released its Spring 2015 Hospital Safety Scores Wednesday, which uses a letter grading system to assess more than 2,500 U.S. hospitals. For the first time, the Hospital Safety Score website allows consumers to see a hospital’s current score alongside its previous scores, so they can easily see if a hospital has maintained performance, improved or gotten worse. To further simplify the comparison process, Leapfrog labeled the 182 hospitals that consistently received an A grade for safety with a “Straight A’s” logo on the Leapfrog website.
This emphasis on simplicity — assigning letter grades consumers are familiar with and making tracking performance easy to view — is designed in an effort to make the “shopping” experience more convenient for consumers. Hospitals that don’t stand out as safe, or rather, hospitals that stand out as particularly unsafe, risk losing new patients and face difficulty maintaining loyalty among previous patients.
In addition to comparing quality and price of services, consumer loyalty is largely influenced by branding. Unlike Tidal, whose marketing message was obscured by its delivery by the rich and famous, hospitals with strong brand identities are most likely to have high patient loyalty.
According to the National Research Corp’s 2014 Market Insights Study of National Brands, familiarity with a hospital brand has a significant impact on how consumers make decisions about their healthcare.
Findings from the study show certain hospitals and health systems are some of the biggest names in healthcare because they have the strongest brands. Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente are in the top stratum in terms of national name recognition and reputation.
About 12 percent of survey respondents said they used the services of the most familiar national brand hospital in the last three years, and one out of three consumers would consider using their most familiar national brand for any treatment or surgery. Additionally, 77 percent of consumers would recommend their most familiar brand to their friends and family. The survey also found consumers associate a positive brand identity with quality, as 56 percent of respondents described their most familiar brand as having a “long-standing reputation for great medicine” and 38 percent described the brand as an “elite provider of health and wellness education.”
There are numerous components that contribute to a company’s success. The ability to fulfill fundamental consumer demands — whether in the music or healthcare industry — will always be the most powerful.
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