Strategic Planning, Analysis and Return on Investment on various Marketing and Business Development Activities – Goyal Anshita Jitendra

Marketing plays an important role in helping healthcare professionals to create, communicate, and provide value to their target market. Marketers have used many methods that include marketing research, product design, distribution, pricing, advertising, promotional sales, and sales management. The healthcare world is competitive, and as local competition grows and large hospital systems come into the mix, the more difficult it can be to stand out and promote your medical services. With the COVID-19 pandemic even the more developed healthcare systems globally, the foundations of India’s healthcare system have naturally also been shaken. The overall response to the pandemic witnessed both the private and government sector working in tandem. The private Indian healthcare players rose to the occasion and have been providing all the support that the government needs, such as testing, isolation beds for treatment, medical staff and equipment at government COVID-19 hospitals and home healthcare.
India’s private healthcare sector has contributed significantly and accounts for about 60 per cent of inpatient care. Most private facilities initiated their plans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which involved significant investments to prepare facilities for controlling and preventing the infection, building infrastructure for quarantine and treatment, and equipping the facility with suitable medical supplies and additional workforce. Additionally, hospitals and labs witnessed a sharp decline in revenue due to delayed medical tourism and elective processes (the pandemic is speculated to trim the private hospitals’ operational profit by approximately 40 per cent this fiscal year. The OPDs (outpatient departments) had also been closed almost throughout the year as per the government advisory. Healthcare marketing allows you to increase your visibility from your competitors on local search engines and social media platforms. With this help of proper planning, execution, analysis of results and understanding the scope of improvements will make it convenient for the team to further plan the activities and events accordingly which in turn will help to increase the patient footfall and hence will increase the revenue of the hospital. The marketing strategy is the way an organization acts under the influence of environmental factors. In practical terms, marketing strategies outline a path following the analysis of environmental factors. The marketing policy defines its general framework of action in order to carry out its entire activity, including several strategies. Developing the marketing policies and strategies specific to health services providing units is a complex process. Taking into account many internal and external factors, the interdependencies and conditioning links between them, as well as the favourable or unfavourable impact they can exert on the health unit, they must be analysed in depth, interrelated, and interpreted for making strategic and firm decisions regarding the future development of the medical institution. This study is done to study the complete process flow of marketing activities, collect data for anaylzing the results and getting acknowledged by the scope of improvement, the study has been started by understanding the planning of the activities, scheduling it considering the factors which could affect the activities, assigning the activities according to the skill set of the team members, the execution process, and later analysing the results of the executed activities. The result are shown in various forms below that is the events planned for the months, patient footfall through health packages launched, patients through doctor referrals, track on number of patients who come for different specialties, and the conversion of patients from OPD to IPD.