E-health videos on Chinese hospitals' websites

This study aims to find out how Chinese hospitals have used online videos as marketing and patient education tools. The findings from this study can help Chinese hospital administrators better understand how to best take advantage of the up-to-date online video delivery technology to conduct contemporary marketing and efficiently help their patients. Based on a systematic probability sample of 2385 Chinese hospitals, the authors conducted a content analysis of Chinese hospital websites in early 2013. The study found that 42% of Chinese hospitals had a website, only 21.8% of these websites contained video(s), and 44.3% of the these video websites carried only one video. The videos were mainly used to provide patient education (27.7%) and to promote a hospital (23.1%). Overall, private hospitals used more videos than state-owned hospitals especially for advertising and promotion, but hospital ranking did not exert much influence. The study concludes that Chinese hospitals need to learn how to turn videos into an integral part of their marketing strategy so as to create both conceptually and technologically user-centric websites to serve themselves and, more importantly, to serve their patients.