Brand management of hospitals

Sajal Dutta

Till late 1960s, management of medical problems depended mostly on the clinical skills and judgement of doctors than on anything else. The advent of microprocessors-based technology changed the world not only in the area of IT and communication, but also in the field of medical and hospital management.

The development of microprocessor lead to a boom of superspecialisation in various areas of medical science. For instance, CT Scan, MRI, cathlab etc, were absent in the 60s, but today they are an integral part of medical and hospital management. The face of hospitals changed from one that would merely receive patients to one that could deliver healthcare in totality to a patient; doctors became an integral part of this healthcare delivery system.

The triangle, which was there earlier between hospitals-doctors-patients dissolved into a two way transaction, the healthcare delivery system and the patient. Healthcare delivery systems are getting complicated day by day and it is becoming increasingly difficult for a patient to differentiate between hospitals in terms of their standard of healthcare offered and this has created the necessity of BRANDING.

Branding of any hospital has essentially two parts. Firstly, information about the services of the hospital and secondly, the word of mouth of patients, who have already been treated in the hospital. It is true that while information about a hospital needs to be disseminated and made available through various means like hoardings, advertisements etc, the brand gets actually created through word of mouth.

Whether a patient is utilising the indoor or outdoor services of a hospital, nowhere does the patient spend more than 20 per cent of time with the doctor; the balance 80 per cent is spent with other people of the hospital, namely front office staff, technicians, nurses and so on. For a common man, it becomes extremely difficult to rate a doctor or a hospital in a short span of time.

Numerous surveys indicate that the medical outcome has very little correlation with the perceived brand of a hospital. High correlation has been found between the levels of professionalism, efficiency and soft skills of hospital staff with the image or perception of the hospital among patients. In reality, display of excellence of service of the hospital through the people with whom the patient spends most of the time, gets extrapolated into excellence of medical treatment in the mind-space of the patient.

It is therefore important for any hospital to constantly work on training programmes of staff, monitoring of response time, grievance redressal of patients who are already inside the hospital to enhance the brand image of the hospital.

However with accreditation standards coming in, future hospitals will be rated by independent accreditation agencies, where patients can judge for themselves which hospital facility is of what standard. Higher penetration of healthcare insurance can be used with accreditation levels to benchmark hospital charges and services, empanelled by health insurance companies. Till then, the word of mouth of the patient would be the gold standard in creating the brand. In such a scenario, each patient essentially becomes a ‘brand ambassador’.

The author is president, Association of Hospitals of Eastern India and managing director, Ruby General Hospital, Kolkata