Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Dec 20, 2021)
Date Submitted: Feb 9, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Understanding the determinants of digital health marketing strategies: a comparison of private and public sector hospitals
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of traditional media and technologies have increased the challenges for public health education and awareness, especially in public hospitals. Despite the importance of social and digital technologies for health promotion, the level of adoption and execution is relatively slow in public hospitals.
Objective:
The present study aims to understand how organizational resources and technology selection as well as structure and culture can influence health-marketing strategies in both public and private hospitals.
Methods:
The study adopts the interpretivist research paradigm and a social constructivist approach to understand individual, organizational, government, structural, financial and cultural factors that can influence the formulation and implementation of health marketing strategies. The study has chosen health professionals and other employees from four public and private hospitals as sources of data.
Results:
The findings reveal that private hospitals have a flat structure and high levels of employee empowerment which enhance collaboration, coordination, skills development, and technology use. The use of social and digital media is common, which increases word of mouth, patient awareness and education, patient engagement and feedback, user generated content and social influence for private hospitals. Conversely, government control and centralization, cost leadership strategy, traditional media and technologies as well as limited resources and human capital are some of the challenges which complicate advanced health marketing practices.
Conclusions:
There is limited literature available regarding the determinants of health marketing strategies for public and private hospitals. The present study explores the strengths that enhance health marketing practices in private hospitals. In addition, the study highlights the challenges of public hospitals which negatively influence advanced health marketing practices and performance outcomes. The study provides a number of recommendations for the health ministry, management in hospitals, and health promotion departments with the purpose of advancing health marketing practices.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.