Patients as consumers: Understanding purchasing patterns

Healthcare is an industry prone to change. Patient populations evolve constantly as new generations bring new habits, values, expectations and needs. For healthcare providers, keeping pace is a challenge. 

Whether we like it or not, today’s patients are consumers. Healthcare organizations need to recognize this and ask themselves the question: how can we create customer loyalty?  

And for the long-term-care community, the issue of who is the consumer is further compounded by the reality that many healthcare decisions are made as a group, or more specifically, a family. For elderly patients, often their children, or grandchildren, lend a voice, and hand, to the healthcare process. In other words, if you’re running a nursing home, remember that your customers aren’t only seniors – the “buyer” may be a tech-savvy, 30-year-old who is reviewing your organization first-and-foremost from what he can find online.

1. Creating loyal customers—or as we marketers would say, brand evangelists—requires both attracting customers, and offering them a better experience than a competitor. The first step is to understand their purchasing patterns. Pulled from a variety of sources and studies, we’ve gathered six key trends to help understand the mindset of today’s patients:

1. Patients are cost-conscious – 59% of patients surveyed in 2014 chose a less expensive care option when comparing prices

2. Patients are readers and researchers – 77% of patients searched online prior to booking an appointment

3. Patients are social – 41% of patients reported social media as a factor that can impact their choice of physician or hospital

4. Patients are web-savvy – 83% of patients booking appointments visited the website of a hospital when searching for care

5. Patients are digitally-minded – 21% of patients booked appointments via computer or mobile device in 2012, a number that certainly has increased five years later

6. Patients are open to sponsored content – 81% of patients click on a sponsored link when looking for health information

So, what advice do we have? We’d recommend that healthcare providers:

• Be affordable (or at least look like it).
• Be digital.
• Be social.
• Be web-friendly.
• Be flexible.
• Be educators.

Healthcare providers need to adapt to meet today’s patients. Previously, healthcare providers’ marketing efforts went something like this: We’re a great institution, we do great stuff, we’ve been doing it for a long time, and you should be our patient.