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Why is tracking ROI more challenging in healthcare?

Article Excerpt
A common theme among healthcare marketers is that healthcare does indeed differ from other sectors of the economy, and marketing in healthcare differs from the marketing in other areas. Many of the techniques used by marketers in other fields don't carry over readily to the marketing of healthcare services. We can't pay bonuses or incentives for referrals. We can't guarantee our work. We are limited in what we can do with pricing (so far). Quality is very difficult to measure and there are, at this writing, no industrywide standards. Packaging has little meaning. We have to be much more careful about what we say in our advertising. We have much stronger privacy restrictions that limit the usage of our own data.

In addition, healthcare has market structure factors that make the purchase process different from that of almost any other sector. No one fully understands healthcare pricing and reimbursement. Patients receive services from hospitals, but those services are usually ordered by an independent third party (the doctor) and paid for by yet another third party (the insurer), who in turn is often paid by yet one more party (the employer). Imagine getting your dry cleaning done that way! The decision process in the usage of health services is driven heavily by emotion, even if we make efforts to apply logic. And we have by far...

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