I am pleased to announce that last week (the first week of the semester) I was honored to have my blog post inducted into the Marketing Blog of Fame! Although nervous and unsure of how much I learned my first week, it appears I was off on the right track!
We had many different reading assignments and videos this week, along with a Pharmasim quiz. While all of these sources aided me in learning and familiarizing myself with marketing, I found the most beneficial source of learning this week to be virtually attending class through the Adobe Connect program. It was a great way to engage the learners into active discussions using their own work experience to identify and apply the marketing concepts being taught.
For some reason (perhaps because of my own chiming in), the healthcare field seemed to come up a lot in the classroom discussion. I currently work as a pharmacy student at a medium sized hospital in New Bedford, MA. Therefore, most of my contributions to this week's discussion stemmed from my experience at the hospital. I'd like to focus most of my blog post on how customer value and satisfaction are measured, interpreted, and applied in marketing where I work.
Since I am merely a student, I am not at the hospital year round; nor do I have a glorified high stakes position. Therefore, most of my examples that I will be discussing are the simple metrics of measuring customer satisfaction at a departmental level rather than an organizational level.
The healthcare field operates a little differently when it comes to customer value and satisfaction. And even within the healthcare field, it is quite obvious that big chain pharmacies like RiteAid, CVS, Walgreens, etc. have MUCH more emphasis on marketing and meeting the customer's expectations than hospitals do. Simply put, there is much less competition among hospitals than there is among retail pharmacies. Additionally, the services provided are SO much different.
For example, CVS may be able to market certain products to attract customers to purchase these goods but a hospital cannot do the same. Rather, the hospital provides a service when approached by the patient. Now I'm not saying that hospitals don't market their services, because they most definitely do. However, due to the nature of their services (emergency, surgery, labor and delivery, etc.) patients are more likely to go to a hospital regardless of how much marketing the hospital has done. This relates to the fact that the patients NEED the hospital in order to survive, improve quality of life, etc. However, customers CHOOSE which retail pharmacy they take their prescriptions to based on how well that chain meets their expectations of products and services.
During the virtual class discussion, we were asked what metrics our organizations use in order to have an idea that our customer's needs and wants are being met. I responded to the class saying that specific to the pharmacy department, we often evaluate how many orders are processed per hour. More importantly than this metric, we measure how long it takes an order to be processed. Perhaps I didn't explain this very well in the class discussion because some of my classmates found this to be a terrible metric.
While we can all agree that the pharmacy department measuring how many orders are processed per hour is more focused on the number than it is on the accuracy, it is important to also look at the nature of the metric. This is why we also measure how long it takes an order to be processed. Yes, speed isn't everything, but timeliness is. For example, if there is a patient in the intensive care unit who is having a seizure, you better make sure that (although perhaps more accurate) that order doesn't take more than ten minutes to process. Otherwise, the patient is left seizing, untreated, with possible fatality if not severe permanent damage.
The same could be said for a patient who has dangerously low blood pressure that could result in death. If the order for a blood pressure raising drug is not processed and made in a timely manner, that patient dies. In this complicated way, accuracy and timeliness battle against each other for the top priority.
So what does all of this have to do with marketing? This is the exact question I asked myself when answering Professor Spotts' question. In the hospital pharmacy sense, this is about as much as we can do to market our services to our patients/customers. It is rare that patients come into the hospital happy and looking forward to the business they are about to exchange in (except for maybe a carpal tunnel surgery which will improve quality of life or the delivery of a baby). Most of the time, it is because people feel sick and they are in pain and unhappy, seeking help. Already, it makes for a hard customer to please. But if the pharmacy department can make sure that our patients are receiving the right medications at the right time, we can improve their health status which will hopefully get them back to feeling "normal". Of course this is not always possible. Many elderly patients pass away, cancer patients lose their battles, overdosed patients cannot be resuscitated, etc. However, it is our job not only as pharmacy staff members but as MARKETERS for our organization to do our part in our patient's treatment and if within our power, make them value the services we provided.
As I get off of my pharmacy soap box, I conclude this week's blog post. The main concept that I took out of this week's materials was this: know how your organization/department measures customer satisfaction and WHY it is done that way. Normally, you would think that quickly entering medication orders would not necessarily be the best metric to use, but when taken into context, we can understand why. What about your company? And why do they use THAT particular metric? What could be changed to make it better reflect the customer's needs, wants, and values?
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