The marketing activity of hospitals in Japan and consumer/patient behavior

Abstract

One of the most important characteristics of medical service is that the needs of patients induce medical service delivery. The delivery site, such as hospitals, nursing home, and medical doctors can not predict the incidence of the needs, therefore the marketing action has not been considered to be important.
In this report, we investigate the reality and attitude of the hospitals in Japan to marketing action. The result revealed that the management people in Japanese hospitals do not think of marketing now. However, we predict that the marketing action will be necessary for them because of the change of the environment surrounding hospitals.