TV shows in pop culture have a big impact on promoting places. When a Sex and the City episode featured the Magnolia Café in New York City, fans began showing up in droves. (The shop now features a Carrie Cupcake.) Game of Thrones inspired pilgrimages to Spain, Croatia and Scotland, among others. And long-running hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy, which is filmed partly at the Sepulveda VA Medical Center in Los Angeles, has inspired fans to visit the location and take snaps.

Hyesung Yoo, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto, notes how viewers can become attracted to TV show backdrops. But will patients actually seek care at a hospital they’ve seen on the small screen?

“It’s not the same as going grocery shopping, or eating a cupcake. But if I’m sick and I have two choices, maybe I take one hospital over another,” Yoo says. “Maybe I drive an extra block because the hospital was on my favourite show.”

In a new research paper, Yoo looked at hospitals in South Korea — which are not allowed to advertise on TV — and how their appearances on shows influence patient visits. She then analyzed whether patients’ choices affected their health outcomes.

The idea grew out of her 2021 PhD thesis about how high-speed trains in Korea, which allowed for easier travel and more choice for patients, influenced care at hospitals near stations.

“I wanted to do something beyond just an advertising study,” she says, adding she also wanted to explore marketing and public institutions with outcomes that could influence public policy.

Yoo looked at shows that aired between 2007 and 2013 in South Korea that included hospital scenes. No dataset existed that provided this information, so she cobbled one together using news articles and announcements on hospital websites and blogs that mentioned filming days, plus a database from a Korean film commission. She also mined TV drama fan pages and forums. “I did regular searches. I surely must have missed some,” she admits.

She identified 136 shows, 13 of which were medical dramas. (She’s noted hospital shows are increasingly popular and thinks searches around more recent time frames would yield more.)

Yoo compared this with the National Health Insurance Services’ datasets, which include information on medical procedures, demographics, patient location, chosen hospital and death.

Excluding patients who arrived by ambulance or were transferred between hospitals (as they had no choice where they went), she analyzed hospital decisions for nearly three million individual outpatient care admissions and more than 500,000 inpatient visits.

The research supported her hypothesis; seeing a TV drama take place at a hospital not far from home influences where patients choose to go. Locations that hosted what Yoo calls “filming goodwill” resulted in a boost in outpatient visits. Essentially, for every one per cent more filming that took place, the hospital saw a 0.75 per cent increase in outpatient visits. Inpatient visits – where a patient is admitted and stays overnight – had a smaller 0.28 per cent increase.

“That makes sense, because for outpatient things like getting a flu shot, they might prefer to go to a hospital where their favourite actor has been working,” says Yoo. “But for more serious things, they don’t want to travel just for that reason.”

Importantly, Yoo wanted to know if patients end up in worse hospitals due to going to hospitals that did filming. She isolated hospital visits that could have been influenced by TV filming from those that were not, comparing 30-day mortality rates after admissions. She found no statistically significant impact on patient outcomes.

Yoo thinks these results could be used by hospital administrators to make decisions about allowing access to their facilities for TV filming, and other purposes, too, with reassurance that it won’t impact patients negatively.

However, the research also highlights how patients think. “I think it’s interesting that patients choose hospitals based on these factors. We would normally think that patients choose based on really important things, because it’s an important decision, it’s very consequential.”

For Yoo, there are implications for those debating rules around how healthcare organizations can promote themselves, and for those curious about how much marketing, product placement and the like influences care choices — for better or worse.

“This finding opens a lot of discussion for public policy makers,” says Yoo. “People do make irrational choices.”