Marketing Health Services, Second Edition

Book Preface

It seems like a lifetime since the first edition of this book was published in 2005. In the past five years, the world has changed significantly—and so have marketing and healthcare. One would think revising a textbook written five years ago would simply require noting the emergence of new marketing techniques, highlighting trends in marketing strategy preferences among healthcare organizations, and updating some of the hard numbers. Under ordinary circumstances in an ordinary industry, this would typically be the case.

The fact of the matter is that healthcare has been and is anything but ordinary. Since the 1980s, the healthcare industry has undergone a series of dramatic changes. Even to observers inured to the constant restructuring and shape shifting that characterize the field, recent developments reflect changes of such magnitude that seasoned professionals can hardly keep pace. By nature, healthcare is a dynamic enterprise that devotes massive resources to the creation of new devices, therapies, and drugs. Beyond advances in medical technology, the industry exhibits a constantly changing system of financing that makes short-term planning difficult and long-term planning impossible. Add to this the constant barrage of mergers and acquisitions affecting both the not-for-profit and the for-profit components of the industry.

Although health professionals have come to expect these types of changes, other forces have come into play that do not represent business as usual. In the past decade, the nation has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of people who lack health insurance. Add to the 47 million uninsured Americans the millions more who are underinsured, and we have the makings of a serious crisis not only in financial terms but also with regard to the health of the public. The uninsured are no longer simply the marginalized members of society who are unemployed, migrant, or too young to know better. They increasingly represent a cross-section of American society, reflected in the startling fact that, today, more than half of all personal bankruptcies are attributed to medical debts or loss of income associated with sickness. These developments have occurred against a backdrop of a failing medical safety net, health facilities overrun with nonpaying patients, financial setbacks for many providers, and shortfalls in Medicaid funding.