Method And Application Of Brand Value Evaluation In Large Public Hospitals

The public hospital is a core part of medical and health service system in China, the major public hospitals especially play a key role in the basic medical services, diagnosis and treatment of critical and difficult diseases, scientific research of medicine, training of medical personnel, disposition of the health emergency, safeguard of major events, guidance and support for primary medical and health institutions. A new round of medical and health system reform was implemented in 2009. And the reform of public hospitals, especially the reform of major public hospitals, which is considered to be the abyssal region of deep-water of the reform and one of the key symbols to the success of the reform, has been put on the important agenda. With further development of the reform, social capital in the city with abundant public hospital resources started in multiple ways to participate in the restructuring of some public hospitals, including the ones run by state-owned enterprises. The public hospital is a kind of complex risky social public service institution with advanced knowledge, high technology and intensive human resources. It brings modern knowledge talented persons, highly technical achievements and collaboration teams together, providing an all-weather medical and health service for people’s health and life safety. Many major public hospitals have formed its own unique culture and brand in the process of long-term development, which are the most important intangible assets of a hospital. Currently, the public hospitals face an external situation of pilot restructuring and increased competition in diversified hospital running, and an internal demand of knowledge management, innovation management and sophisticated management. Therefore, it has the important practical significance for public hospitals to sets up the brand consciousness, strengthening brand management and evaluating the brand value scientifically.This paper starts from the characteristics of medical services taking large public hospitals as samples, and adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative, theoretical and empirical research. With the use of literature research, in-depth interviews, questionnaires and field surveys, we form the brand value of the hospitals as four dimensions(brand building, medical services, research and education, and financial assets). By document research, field research, expert consultation, a total of 13 secondary indicators and 97 operational indicators was summarized. Then by the Delphi expert consultation, the evaluation index system is constructed with 3 first class index(hospital popularity, medical service quality and scientific research development potentiality) and 15 second class indexes. At the same time, the traditional and improved analytic hierarchy process approaches(AHP & AGA-AHP) are separately used to determine the weight of each index. Finally, some of the large public hospitals in Beijing are taken as the research object for an empirical research on brand valuation from the quantitative and qualitative perspectives.The main conclusions of this paper include:(1) Brand positioning with the core of public welfare and tightly focusing on property and responsibility is an effective way for large public hospitals to better achieve their mandate and mission.(2) Four dimensions(brand building, medical services, research and education, and financial assets) can be used to evaluate large public hospitals brand value. Hospital popularity, medical service quality and scientific research development potentiality are the core factors to build large public hospitals brand value.(3) AHP and AGA-AHP have their own advantages. AHP is easier to use, while the weight conformance requirements in AGA-AHP is met easily without repeated experiments. Therefore, the results of a comparative assessment with different methods are more robust, and this can identify the more important hospitals.(4) According to the two methods, the expert reputation, patient satisfaction, outpatient volume and the number of high-end talent have higher weights and important influence. The empirical study result showed that Chaoyang Hospital and Anzhen Hospital are in the top three. The main reason is that they have obvious advantages in the number of Key Laboratory and the occupancy rate. Medical service quality, high-end talent, science and education level, peer recognition and patient satisfaction are the core elements of large public hospitals brand value.The innovation of this paper include:(1) Taking the large public hospitals as research objects, it presents that brand of large public hospitals with the core of public welfare should be positioned around four dimensions(brand building, medical services, research and education, and financial assets), which improves the theory and methods of the hospital brand value brand valuation in china.(2) With the analysis of the characteristics of public hospitals and hospital brand components, it has constructed the large public hospitals value evaluation index system with 3 first class index(hospital popularity, medical service quality and scientific research development potentiality) and 15 second class indexes by the Delphi expert consultation from four dimensions(brand building, medical services, research and education, and financial assets), it is the first study to introduce “scientific research development potentiality” in the index system, which accords with the practice of large public hospitals with a comprehensive, systematic and representative.(3) Using AHP and AGA-AHP methods to determine the weight of the large public hospitals value evaluation index system, it gained the results of the hospital brand evaluation by a quantitative and qualitative research with some of the large public hospitals in Beijing, and it analyzed the evaluation results under the two methods.(4) The idea of hospital brand value monetization was realized by a sample attempt, and then a countermeasure about hospital brand construction and brand strategy management was also put forward.