Laurie Gelb
lmgelb@comcast.net

Welcome to my idiosyncratic but hopefully intelligible home page, an overgrown lawn since 2000, but hopefully soon in major revision, to reflect the health outcomes pieces that I have begun to integrate into the marketing mix. Not that there's really any fundamental contradiction, given that marketing is supposed to facilitate exchanges of equal value.

If you have only wandered in to find other things, jump straight to various lists of Web links. Otherwise, you can meander through my visions of product-driven medical and Internet marketing and move on to the links when you get bored. Who am I to editorialize? My résumé offers some clues. Anyway, here are two of my prejudices (if you are in academia, substitute "initial assumptions") up front:

1. Health care marketing must be product-driven in order to implement mutually-beneficial exchanges. Product is more important to health care's marketing mix than that of many other industries, and should never be considered subordinate to other mix elements.
2. "Product-driven" health care is unattainable through the mere existence of institutional or corporate task forces and resultant cookie-cutter marketing strategies ("recognize the importance of managed care" is my favorite). A product-oriented environment requires, ultimately, both clinical and administrative input into all clinical and administrative functions. Of course, many entities are far from attaining that goal. Thus, following are a few tools and ideas for facilitating its attainment.

Focusing specifically on Web-based health care information is the abstract for my presentation at WebNet 96. You may also wish to view slides for my 10-minute presentation. Or view twice as many slides. A full text version takes a more emotional approach. If you remember nothing else from this page, please keep in mind that acquiring both wanted and unwanted information incurscosts!

(Re)focusing health care marketing: Designed for front-line patient contact staff, here are fairly detailed notes for a presentation on customer service, delivered to the employees of an outpatient physical therapy clinic.

A Journal of Health Care Marketing review discusses the adaptation of marketing principles to managed care patient contact functions. Organizational indifference toward the priority of recruiting and retaining staff who can support needs-focused operations remains the major barrier to achieving viable marketing exchanges in health care.

Another review recaps my continuing argument that health care marketers often do not recognize their products' unique characteristics.

Three more reviews from JHCM:

• Public Relations in Health Care: A Guide For Professionals
• Marketing Success: How to Market a Long Term Care Facility More Effectively... in the '90's
• Professional Services Marketing: Strategy and Tactics

Integrating the Internet: The text version of the poster, A Representational Data Model for Web Site Administrators, presented in 1994 at the WWW Conference in Chicago, offers insight as to the differences between data and information, and why you should care. And now for some brief venting on on what amounts to well-intentioned demarketing of the Internet. Yes, demarketing is an authentic marketing term. Think about health care. If you concentrate on lowering consumer expectations regarding the product, only the most needy are interested. If you inflate expectations, the services received will dwarf expectations, leading to dissatisfaction and reduced propensity for appropriate utilization. If you market the Internet as the answer to all questions, you set new users up for disillusionment, and diminish their ability to objectively assess and to fully utilize your product.

Ready for some LINKS? First, a disclaimer. Many of these links are provided here because someone asked me to find them. Many do not represent my personal tastes, activities or beliefs.

Probably a comprehensive categorization of my "hotlist" is the best way to start. But, if that one's overwhelming, you can try a professional hotlist which is a subset of various lists above.

Please e-mail me and let me know if any of the contents herein are helpful or harmful.