11. Health Marketing

Health Marketing is a multidisciplinary area of public health practice. This innovative approach draws from traditional marketing theories and principles and adds science-based strategies to prevention, health promotion and health protection. Drawing from fields such as marketing, communication, and public health promotion, health marketing provides a framework of theories; strategies and techniques that can be used to guide work in public health research, interventions, and communication campaigns.

Health Marketing involves creating, communicating, and delivering health information and interventions using customer-centered and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations (CDC, 2005). Health Marketing is: A multidisciplinary practice that promotes the use of marketing research to educate, motivate and inform the public on health messages. An integration of the traditional marketing field with public health research, theory and practice. A complex framework that provides guidance for designing health interventions, campaigns, communications, and research projects

A broad range of strategies and techniques that can be used to create synergy. The five health markets typically analyzed are: Healthcare financing market, Physician and nurse’s services market, Institutional services market, Input factors market, Professional education market.

Consumers in health care markets often suffer from a lack of adequate information about what services they need to buy and which providers offer the best value proposition. Health economists have documented a problem with supplier-induced demand, whereby providers base treatment recommendations on economic, rather than medical criteria. Researchers have also documented substantial "practice variations", whereby the treatment a patient receives depends as much on which doctor they visit as it does on their condition. Both private insurers and government payers use a variety of controls on service availability to rein in inducement and practice variations.