The real cost of healthcare marketing
Marketing not only eats away at hospital budgets, but at the integrity of our practice.
Stepping off the jet bridge at the New Orleans Louis Armstrong International Airport, I’m immediately bombarded with an array of advertisements for each of the local healthcare duopolies. Giant billboards featuring smiling children and bright-eyed doctors line the walls of the terminal. Blue and teal banners hang from the ceiling. According to Statista.com, the average marketing budget of healthcare organizations in the United States was $9.1 million in 2023.
But for patients and providers, the cost of marketing isn’t strictly financial.
The nature of healthcare marketing ranges from patronizing to predatory. It pitches solutions without complexity or nuance. It offers the false possibility of comfort and cure outside of collaboration. And perhaps most unhelpfully, it reinforces healthcare’s positioning as an individual product or service rather than a collective right and relational responsibility.
As healthcare providers, we get pulled into the fray of healthcare marketing when we’re told we need to “sell” patients on our plans of care. Or get “buy-in” for our services. Or when we leave the world of corporate medicine and throw our hat into the ring of private practice. Our participation in these marketing tactics, though benevolently-intentioned, can contribute to our own sense of disillusionment and disconnection with our patients.
Sustainable, health-promoting patient:provider relationships are built on truly informed consent, transparency, mutually agreed-upon expectations, and accountability. These principles, along with our broader demonstration of commitment to the social, environmental health of our communities, create a foundation of trust.
Practicing through a marketing lens encourages us to inflate expectations, downplay risks, and compromise our integrity. Marketing frameworks grant us permission to “stay in our lane,” to take a “neutral” stance on the ways power and politics shape health. They allows us to compromise on our commitment to our patients’ well-being as long as we’re fulfilling our imperative to attract and retain their business.
If we find ourselves struggling to stay connected to our work within capitalism’s embrace of our field, we may find grounding in a basic truth: In a world with illness, healthcare shouldn’t need to market itself.
A sick person’s use of a community’s healthcare system should be as obvious and seamless as a family’s use of its school system or a commuter’s use of its public transit.
Instead, we’ve built mountainous barriers to access, undermined the trust of communities through patterns of neglect, abuse, and misinformation, divested from the political and social structures that have the largest impact on health outcomes, and reduced our services to a series of siloed, individual encounters.
Our need for marketing tactics to engage patients with healthcare is a symptom of our system’s dysfunction.
We don’t have the luxury of opting out of marketing’s influence on our practice. But we do have the opportunity to challenge it, to reimagine a healthcare system that doesn’t require marketing, to reshape the value system that defines our field.