Positioning Stratagem In Healthcare Service-Core Mean For Hospitals To Sustain Preponderance In Competition

With reforms and opening deepened and socialist market economy established in China in the recent years, the macro and microenvironments of survival and competition for hospitals, the major providers of healthcare service, have undergone enormous changes. However, as healthcare service is regarded as social welfare, which results in stagnation in reforms of hospital structure and operation, hospital managers fall short of correct understanding and judgment over the changing macro and microenvironments that facilitate their initiative in taking adaptive measures. Objectively, they also lack necessary theory, management skills and resources such as ready methods, supports, manpower and information to conduct and realize reforms. These have caused some serious problems in healthcare service with focus on people's increasing dissatisfaction with healthcare services and difficult relationship between healthcare professionals and patients. On one hand, hospitals face people's rising expectation of quality service and great pressure of reform request from society and governmental sectors. On another hand, the competition of healthcare service becomes tense when the supply capacity of out-of-order, low-level, repeated healthcare services increases. Under such situations, hospitals cry for the theory and skills of modern marketing management to improve the quality of healthcare service and to sustain preponderance in long run competition. This article attempts to discuss how hospitals build up the preponderance in long run competition considering the special characteristics of healthcare service by combining the latest theory and skills of modern service marketing study. As service marketing concerns many fields, this article specially analyzes and discusses how hospitals use the positioning theory and skills of service market, i.e. segmenting, targeting and positioning (STP) to sustain preponderance in long run competition. Besides the four common characteristics of all services, i.e. invisibility, inseparability of production and consumption, otherness, and inability of storage, healthcare service has its other special characteristics such as ethics, commonweal, high risks, universality and special relationship between health professionals and patients, which exert great influences upon healthcare service. Accordingly, this article conducts further analysis on the characteristics of behavior of patients, the consumers and the center of healthcare service. Analysis is conducted largely from the perspective of client relation including definition of patient's satisfaction, factors affecting patient's satisfaction, etc. Quality factor plays an important role in affecting patient's satisfaction, so this article first analyzes the meaning of healthcare quality, which can be divided into technical quality and function quality. Patients judge healthcare service mainly from five dimensions, i.e. reliability, response, integrity, empathy and materiality. For hospital managers, it is of strategic significance to learn the root of patient's satisfaction and it is also a key perspective to position client relation. This article analyzes in details through study of service quality model and its two important factors, i.e. patient's service expectation and service experience, including proper expectation and ideal expectation as well as tolerance between two expectations. It is more important to learn the factors that affect patient's ideal and proper expectations. Only when patient's service expectation is properly recognized can hospitals correctly design service products and standards, properly organize, implement and carefully create external factors to influence patients and improve patient's satisfaction. Besides analysis on patient's expectation through service quality model, this article also studies "the real moment" and key ways of healthcare service perception through the perspective of patient's experience to learn the process of patient's physical perception of healthcare service in order to improve patient's satisf...