Transparency: it's about the customers.

Few days go by without another news report about one of the 50 states requiring its hospitals to post quality, cost, or patient satisfaction data online. Web sites now contain data about infection rates, mortality rates, and which doctors perform best when working on heart patients in California. Hospital executives are busily working to figure out a way to provide patients with the data they're demanding to make healthcare decisions.

Fueled by the rise in consumer-directed health plans, the transparency movement is one that's here to stay, says Carolyn Kent, a consultant with Cleverley and Associates, a consulting firm based in Columbus, OH, and author of the white paper Marketing in Times of Price Transparency.

Consumers have been forced to pay more attention to their healthcare, and now they're gaining interest in, not only the cost and quality of your facility, but the total experience as well.

"Transparency speaks to the package of values that a consumer is looking for," Kent says. "Marketers have to constantly come back to understanding what consumers value and position themselves to deliver."

Responding to the transparency movement doesn't just mean posting pages of data on your site. It's about posting information that your patients want, in a way that they can understand.

What do they want?

Some hospitals are loading their Web sites with data about quality metrics, costs for various procedures, and patient satisfaction ratings from various organizations. Next spring, the federal government will release the first results of its own patient satisfaction data, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Care Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), and hospital executives across the country are meeting to discuss their strategy for reporting these survey results.

But do cost, quality, and patient satisfaction data really affect how patients choose where to seek care? Healthcare marketing expert Anthony Cirillo of Huntersville, NC-based Fast Forward Consulting says no.

"Even with all the emphasis on transparency, I think it still comes down to where the physician recommends people go," Cirillo says. Most …