Medicine and Health Commons^™

Consumer Behavior In The Health Marketplace: Emphasis On Access To Care, Lu Ann Aday

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

The particular aspect of "consumer behavior in the health marketplace" I should like to emphasize is the problem of access to medical care.

Health care policy makers, planners, administrators, and medical care consumers themselves are increasingly voicing their concern that access to the medical care system should be improved. A plethora of programs has been launched during the past decade with the expressed objective of achieving equity of access to medical care in the United States.

Some of these programs are directed at increasing the buying power or medical knowledge of the health care consumer-e.g., Medicaid, Medicare, national health insurance, …

Whose Behavior In What Health Marketplace?, Leon S. Robertson

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

A number of behavioral scientists and health educators have been engaged for some time in attempts to explain and/or influence human behavior regarding health and illness. Behavior directed toward preserving health is called health behavior.1 Behavior subsequent to the perception of symptoms and directed toward diagnosis and treatment is called illness behavior.

It has been suggested that techniques used to market products and services can be used to help individuals fulfill their needs in both prevention and amelioration of illness as well as in the alleviation of other social problems. In this paper I shall review some principles that have …

New Themes In Innovation Research: Implications For Consumer Health Behavior, Gerald Zaltman

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

Whenever I am called upon to make prescriptive statements to a group which can't easily hold me accountable for the consequences, I am always reminded of the story of the chicken and the pig. For those of you who aren't familiar with the story, a chicken and a pig were walking down the street one day and came upon a restaurant that had a big sign in the window, "Special Today: Bacon and Eggs." The chicken got all excited and said, "Isn't that great, they are featuring us together." The pig looked kind of dour and said, "That's okay for …

Some Lessons From The Feeling Good Television Series, James W. Swinehart

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

There has been a lot of discussion recently, in the press and elsewhere, about the need for more preventive health action on the part of the public. This concern was the basis for the Feeling Good project. The original proposal was for 26 one-hour programs to be broadcast weekly on Public Broadcasting Systems (PBS). When we were about 6 programs into the series, however, the decision was made to stop after the first 11 one-hour shows, take a two-month break to retool and return with 13 half-hour shows.

Leon Robertson talked about some of the problems with using education as …

Consumer Behavior In The Health Marketplace: A Symposium Proceedings: Contents, Schedule, & Preface, Ian Newman

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

This symposium grew out of informal departmental discussions seeking new ideas concerning the effectiveness of health education, particularly as it is applied to the purchase of health related products and services. Two specific objectives were established to guide the program: 1) to bring together a cross section of experts to discuss, each from his/her own perspective, issues of consumers and their behavior in purchasing health related goods and services. By providing a platform of notable speakers we hoped to achieve the second objective, to attract interested people from the university community, Lincoln, and surrounding communities. We hoped that new contacts …

Selling Health To The Public, Godfrey M. Hochbaum

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

Let me confess at the outset that I feel uncomfortable with the title given to my presentation, "Selling Health to the Public," and that I feel equally uncomfortable with such terms as, "marketing health," "the health marketplace," or any others that equate the health area with the marketplace.

These terms have become quite popular in recent years because the presumed success of Madison Avenue and the methods and gimmicks of commercial sales promotion easily tempt health professionals to adopt these same methods and gimmicks in the cause of health education.

I feel uncomfortable with these terms and with what they …

The Adult As A Consumer Of Learning, Malcolm Knowles

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

What I would like to do is explore with you what I think we know (and I will try to separate what we know from what we speculate about, as far as I can) about the behavior in the marketplace of adults as learners. Those of you who are in health education will find relevance in terms of patient teaching, of public health education, and even in pre-service and in-service education of health educators. Those of you who are not in health education can make applications to your respective fields of work.

Let me start by developing a little historical …

The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, Nathan Maccoby

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

This afternoon I want to tell you about the results of a major study we have been doing as a part of the Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program. The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program is an interdisciplinary project directed by Dr. John W. Farquhar, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and I am co-director. This paper was really co-authored by fifteen people as part of an interdisciplinary team. With a group of different people like this, we had to spend a significant amount of time trying to teach each other our respective professional languages. Initially, communication within our group was …

Consumer Behavior: An Epidemiological Perspective, Thomas J. Prendergast

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

My interest is epidemiology and preventive medicine. Epidemiology is the study of disease distributions in man. Preventive medicine is the attempt to avoid acquiring the risk factors of diseases by individuals, which can be called "primary prevention." Also it is the attempt to avoid development of diseases among those who have risk factors, and that is known as secondary prevention. Quite clearly there is much concern about epidemiology as the basis for preventive medicine and about preventive medicine as a potentially cheaper and easier way to provide quality medicine. Health education is a clear dimension of preventive medicine.

We have …

Sociological Factors In High Blood Pressure, Sidney M. Stahl

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

High blood pressure is a silent killer and is therefore one of the most significant of the medically related problems that afflicts modern man. Approximately 25 million people living in the United States have the disease. In reality, it is not a "disease" in the classic meaning of that term; instead its sequelae, or subsequent effects, are diseases that are all too familiar and deadly: stroke, kidney disease and myocardial infarction (heart attack), to name just a few. In fact, there are more deaths in the United States each year attributable to the sequelae of high blood pressure than to …

Some Determinants Of Post -Purchase Satisfaction Among Medical Care Consumers, Lawrence Wortzel

Consumer Behavior in the Health Marketplace: Symposium Proceedings

Consumer behavior in the health marketplace is an interesting subject. One of the interesting things about studying medical care is that different people experience different results after having the same health care. For example, in the Massachusetts presidential primary that took place some time ago, one of the voting machines somehow got hooked up to an X-ray device, and, as a result, three voters were exposed to doses of radiation. One of the exposed was a conservative, one was a liberal, and one was an independent. They were immediately rushed to one of the major Boston medical centers where a …

The Utilization Of Preventive Health Care Services By Low Income Members Of A Comprehensive Prepaid Health Plan : The Impact Of Outreach Services, Linda Elmlund Mahoney

Dissertations and Theses

A reading of recent studies in preventative health care behavior recalls the proverb about the blind men and the elephant: each man is able to describe the part of the animal he is closest to, but none can see, and so none can put their diverse and often contradictory opinions together to come up with an accurate description of the whole elephant. Similarly, in preventative health care studies, each researcher or research group is able to observe the preventative health care utilization patterns of specific populations at particular times, but the conclusions reached are often based on less than complete …