Hospital services as a tool in physician marketing

The marketing of hospitals to physicians is of importance because of the latter's hypothesized primacy in health care buying decisions. The notion of marketing to physicians was investigated in terms of types of services offered by hospitals. The results indicated that successfully performing hospitals are more likely to offer high technology services for diagnostic and therapeutic tasks. Further, there was no significant difference between successfully and unsuccessfully performing hospitals in the provision of services marketed to the community. It was concluded that offering these high technology services may be an effective way of marketing hospitals to physicians.