Question

Topic: Student Questions

Need Assistance With Determining Market Size.

Posted by Jeanmmkk on 3/25/2013 at 11:12 AM ET 250 Points
My name is Jean Marte and I am currently a student at FIU (Florida International University). I am writing this email in order to see if you guys could assist me with a project. I am majoring in health administration and one of my classes ,HSA 4170 (health care finance), asked me to create a business plan. I am in charge of the industry and market analysis as well as the overall marketing plan because they are correlated. However, I am totally lost and cannot find how to determine the market size of health care. I asked the professor for assistance and she basically said that I must determine the market size of the people the private practice will be serving. In this case, that means the city of Doral, Weschester, and Kendall. This is my first business plan so it is intimidating because there are no clear cut, yes or no answers, but I want to do a great job on it because it will probably form a big part of my career. Essentially, I want to learn how to develop a marketing plan correctly.

Key points:
Determining market size of health care in three cities (Doral, Weschester, Kendall)
Overall help with industry analysis in health care
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 3/25/2013 at 12:45 PM Accepted
    Wikipedia has up-to-date census info for the cities you're looking for.
    What % of these people will likely be served by the practice? If you're not sure, find out what # similar practices in the areas serve.

    As far as industry analysis, what specific questions do you have? We don't do others' homework (since it's your future), but can help with analysis/thinking.
  • Posted by Moriarty on 3/25/2013 at 3:22 PM Accepted
    Have you asked doctor's practices in the areas you mention? After all, they are the ones who will know this, and it isn't going to prejudice patient confidentiality - especially if you mention that you are a student. They may give you some other insights that only a practice of this kind can.
  • Posted on 3/25/2013 at 6:08 PM Accepted
    What kind of business is this for? "Healthcare" is a huge market, so you'll want to narrow it somewhat. Is there a particular specialty?
  • Posted by Jeanmmkk on 3/25/2013 at 9:26 PM Author
    The specialty is internal medicine. General check-ups, EKGs, pulmonary function tests and other minor procedures are preformed. I was thinking of taking their population number and dividing it by the 5k patients that they already have in all three cities combined. I do not know if that is correct. From what i have researched, I need revenues in order to calculate the market size and I have not found any information on that. Only the overwhelming expense here in the U.S.
  • Posted by Peter (henna gaijin) on 3/26/2013 at 2:19 PM Accepted
    First, expect that you will be making some assumptions and guesses, and you likely need ti write these down in your report.

    The total possible market is the population of the towns. If you take the 5k clients the private practice has and divide into this, that gives you what percentage of the total market they have right now.

    You could take this one step further - presumably the private practice only handles insured patients. If you could find out what percentage of people in the area have insurance, you could multiply that percentage by the total population and get what percent of insured people the private practice currently reaches. If you can't find local insurance numbers, there have been various numbers published for state by state or (if nothing else) nationwide as part of the political battles (and news reports coming from it) related to Obamacare.

    If you know that the facility focuses on a certain kind of patient (for example, if they focused on sports medicine), you would try to determine number of people who take part in sports/exercise in the area to try to determine what percentage of that market they currently reach.

    Not sure if it is your part, but the report likely should include how changes to insurance due to Obamacare will impact this business. Part of the "political" section of a PESTEL analysis.
  • Posted by marketingcomics on 4/3/2013 at 2:30 AM Accepted
    I'm a student too! :D
    When lecturer tell me to make marketing plan. My marketing management lecturer explains it best. she says "to do a marketing plan answer these questions, where are we now?, where do we want to go?" , and how will we get there?

    What she basically say is 1) Introduction 2)External analysis (Pestel or porters 5 forces ...etc) , 3) internal analysis (SWOT), 4) our analysis of data both external and internal, 5)evaluation and recommendation.

    And when it comes to determining the market size, We usually use databases in the Library, and statistical websites like International monetary fund, Data bank, and others (yeah they sound economics but they do have good data) . I just Googled about USA and found this first link lol which might be useful: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/access_to_health_care.htm ,

    Another technique is like Jay Hamilton said which is using Wikipedia. Wikipedia is our Lecturers worst enemy but the links in the end of Wikipedia's page are great resources and trustable.
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