White Paper: Understanding the Importance of Accountability for Hospital Marketing Investments
One of the greatest challenges that has historically confronted hospitals of all sizes and sponsorships is how to measure the return on investment of their marketing efforts.The vague nature of many promotional undertakings, the numerous variables that go into defining success and the inability to adequately answer the skeptics' claim that "these patients would have come here anyway" has made measurement an exercise that for many years was conveniently swept under the rug.
Today is a far cry from the early 1980s when the term "marketing" was first being introduced within the healthcare industry. Back then it would have been unimaginable to have used the words "marketing" and "return on investment" in the same sentence. Fortunately, much has changed in the generation that has passed.
http://www.dmnews.com/pdffiles/roipaper.pdf
