Doctors very often become bigger than hospitals, at least in terms of brand value.Good enough for hospital authorities, until those doctors decide to say goodbye.
MUMBAI: Doctors very often become bigger than hospitals, at least in terms of brand value. Good enough for hospital authorities, until those doctors decide to say goodbye.
Delhi-based Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre was going great guns until veteran cardiologist Dr Naresh Trehan ended his association with it. For most people, he was the face of the institution.
And when he left the loss of face was followed by a financial one. The patient inflow at the country’s premier heart centre witnessed a slide. Fortis Group, which owns Escorts, showed a decline in FY08 third-quarter revenues.
The traditional Indian practice of personality-based branding for hospitals, of course, has its pluses. Dr Devi Shetty of Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Ramakanta Panda of Asian Heart Institute are cases in point.
But there are minuses too, as Escorts found out in the Trehan case even though it feels otherwise. “We have been very careful to build institution brand for Fortis rather than an individual brand, although we always promote our key individuals as they are the drivers,” said Sudarshan Mazumdar, director of marketing, Fortis Healthcare.
The Indian healthcare industry is estimated to grow from $35 billion currently to over $40 billion by 2012. Coupled with the rising spending capacity of the people and growing medical tourism, hospitals need to build their differentiating brands to remain in the competitive market.
Looking ahead brand consultants feel that hospitals should start looking beyond creating person-based branding to avoid these pitfalls.
They advocate creating brand identity around the special characteristics offered by the hospitals, which could be in terms of services, technology and so on.
Raghu B Vishwanath, managing director, Vetrebrand Management Consulting Pvt Ltd, said: “Hospitals need to manage their brands independent of persons so that they do not dilute their equity by being vulnerable to the individual.”
But this also requires a certain amount of unlearning in the Indian context. “In India, it is very difficult to dissociate with individual led brands,” Vishwanath said.
Vishal Bali, CEO, Wockhardt Hospitals Group, said: “The hospitals that associate brands with individuals are primarily single institutions with patient convergence at that centre and have not been able to expand. The need of the hour is network of branded healthcare institutions, which has to be built based on service differentiators.”
Creating value propositions at each of the touch points help build these differentiators.
US-based Mayo Clinic is considered the strongest healthcare brand globally. Experts feel that they have been able to balance the tangible, in the form of advanced technology and research, with the intangible, mainly patient care and services.
Looking domestically, renowned for cancer care centre Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai is yet another example of how the hospital has built its brand above individuals. The premier cancer centre has gone beyond doctors and even technology to reach out to patients and their families by way of counselling centres, palliative care, hence differentiating from the rest.
The winds of change have started to blow. “Although still in infancy, hospitals are realising the importance of branding and are coming up with innovative ways,” Vishwanath added.
For example, along with instituting advanced technology, the Fortis group is looking at patient response as a branding tool. The group has developed a customer satisfaction measurement model that helps the chain benchmark its services as against competition while being interactive.
Apollo Hospitals Group, the country’s biggest healthcare player, said it is its medical staff and their success rate that speak for the brand. “We score the highest in clinical outcome, which is the single most important factor for any hospital and it is this along with our team of doctors that builds our brand,” said V P Kamath, chief executive officer, Apollo Hospitals, Mumbai.
Wockhardt, on its part, feels it is the focus on core specialities and professionalism-driven agenda that separates it from the rest.
s_archana23@dnaindia.net
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