Thoughts about non-profit hospitals

As I went through this week's readings, I tried to make a connection between the marketing strategies these readings suggested and the type of non-profit organizations I am interested in - hospitals, but failed. Although strategies such as segmentation and primary and secondary marketing analysis work well for awareness campaigns or organizations delivering products or services, none of them seems to apply for hospitals. In China it is considered inappropriate for hospitals to use media for advertisement, because hospital's reputation is built upon its quality care and test of time, but not "boasting" how good it is. Therefore, it is very difficult for new hospitals to open its market, and the only way seems to be word-of-mouth. Even here I have only seen TV ads of Duke Medicine, but never seen anything about UNC Health Care or Rex Hospital. So I am wondering how these non-profit hospitals conduct their marketing and PR, anything we could learn from...