A Design Framework for a Market Intelligence System for Healthcare Sector

Abstract

The healthcare market is a dynamic sector, where marketing decisions are decisive and critical. Strategic and tactical planning demand data and information to produce knowledge, which will capacitate firms for business maneuvers as product positioning, pricing, and technological implementation for optimal business development. Marketing data and information must be provided from a variety of sources to produce knowledge, in a process that can be characterized as “organizational intelligence.” Collected contents from healthcare associated industrial sectors, such as chemical and pharmaceutical, have the potential to produce integrated value chain knowledge, improving analysis and decision processes. Approaching the healthcare market, a framework for an intelligence system for marketing decisions is discussed in this chapter. Initially reviewing the literature, a conceptual base is formed, which delimits the evaluation of intended framework. As an exam of practical marketing intelligence system application, case studies of real decisions observed in Brazilian market are done at the end of the chapter to evaluate how intelligence and knowledge, as conceptualized in the literature review, serve in typical healthcare marketing competition, as managerial support for problem solutions.