HLTH 4115 Week 5 Market Segmentation Brief Example

Segmentation Brief: Five Injury Groups in the Northern Service Area, Two to Design Around and One Named Out of Scope

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4115: Strategic Planning and Marketing in Healthcare

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Segmentation Brief: Five Injury Groups in the Northern Service Area, Two to Design Around and One Named Out of Scope

Purpose

This brief divides the injured residents of the northern service area into groups that would need different things from a walk-in orthopedic clinic, then decides which groups the clinic will be designed around. Smith (1956) described segmentation as recognizing that a market is made of groups with different wants and adjusting the offer to fit them, rather than offering one product to everyone. The point of the exercise is the choice, which strategy texts treat as a decision about the scope of a service rather than a detail of promotion (Ginter et al., 2018). Figures are illustrative for a composite county.

Five Segments

Table 1 sets out five segments and what each would need.

Table 1

Injury Segments in the Northern Service Area (Illustrative)

The Segments the Clinic Is Designed Around

The clinic will be designed around youth athletes and their parents and adults on Medicaid or uninsured. Youth athletes account for about a third of the area's injury visits to the emergency department and cluster in the evening and weekend hours that no orthopedic option now covers. Residents covered by those two Medicaid plans are shut out of the only orthopedic walk-in clinic, because the orthopedic group does not accept two Medicaid plans. Designing for these two groups means evening and weekend hours, staff comfortable with children, every Medicaid contract in place on day one and the hospital's financial assistance policy posted at the front desk. Active adults will be served well by the same design and need no separate features. Injured workers will be welcomed but the clinic will not build employer reporting services in its first year.

The Segment Named Out of Scope

Older adults with falls are out of scope for the clinic. This is not because they matter less. A fall in an older adult can hide a head injury, a hip fracture that X-ray misses or a medical cause such as a heart rhythm problem, and these patients need the emergency department's full evaluation and a pathway to admission. A walk-in clinic that invited them would risk delaying care. The clinic's messages will say plainly that adults over 65 with a fall belong in the emergency department, by ambulance if needed, and staff will be trained to redirect them. The hospital's fall prevention program, rather than the clinic, is the right service to design around this group.

What the Choice Costs

Designing around the Medicaid segment lowers the clinic's average payment per visit and will make its finances harder than a clinic designed only for commercially insured families. Marketing texts note that each segment chosen should be large enough, reachable and worth the cost of serving (Berkowitz, 2017). The Medicaid segment is large and reachable, through schools and the county's Medicaid enrollment office, but it is less profitable. The brief chooses it anyway because the nonprofit charter and the market gap both point to it, and because the youth athlete segment, which is mostly commercially insured, can carry part of the cost. Whether that balance works is a question for the financial plan.

Next Step

The positioning statement next week will be written for the two primary segments, and its claims will need to hold for both: a parent with a high-deductible plan and a parent on Medicaid should each recognize the clinic as theirs.

References

Berkowitz, E. N. (2017). Essentials of health care marketing (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations (8th ed.). Wiley.

Smith, W. R. (1956). Product differentiation and market segmentation as alternative marketing strategies. Journal of Marketing, 21(1), 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224295602100102