Competition, Marketing Mix, and Pricing Research Assignment

Competition, Marketing Mix and Pricing
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Introduction
Healthcare providers provide different products and services to clients. Healthcare providers include those involved in primary care, nursing care, and specialty care. The paper will focus on Massachusetts General Hospital primary care provider where it will analyze the characteristics of users of products and services, analyze the competitive environment, determine tools of marketing mix and best pricing strategy of the products and services offered by Massachusetts General Hospital. Primary care healthcare providers offer consultation of minor health problems and checkups, nursing care look after patients while specialty care deal with cases referred from primary care such as heart disorders. The practitioners under primary care include generalist, obstetricians, gynecologists and nurse practitioners (Vorvick et al., 2014).
Characteristics of Massachusetts General Hospital patients
Massachusetts General Hospital offers medical services to infants, adults, disabled and elderly. Pediatric services are offered to infants from primary care and treatment of rare disorders. Programs and services offered to elderly include health care, home care and caregiver support. Massachusetts General Hospital patients living in Massachusetts have health cover or are assisted paying for health care charges through programs undertaken by state such as Mass Health, the Health connector and Health safety Net. For patients without insurance cover or healthcare bill not covered by insurance they pay the bills. However, when patients without insurance are unable to foot the medical bills, they qualify to apply for a discount which is a financial assistance offered by the hospital. Apart from primary care the hospital also offers nursing care and specialty care (Massachusetts General Hospital, 2007).
Massachusetts General Hospital competitive environment
According to Rivers & Glover (2008), competition of healthcare providers was conventionally based on price and quality. However, competition can now be based on elements such as new technology and innovation. Competition in primary care includes, practitioners’ competing for patients and hospitals providing primary care compete for practitioners. Practitioners compete for patients who do not have medical insurance and pay for services and patients who have medical insurance which pay for the services. Entry of many practitioners in the primary care has created competition, where practitioners have to provide quality services and charge economical prices for their services in order to attract many patients.
On the other hand, Massachusetts General Hospital primary care has a range of healthcare insurance for resident of Massachusetts such as mass health standard which covers younger people and adults up to the age of 65 years, Mass health common health which cover disabled children and adults up to the age of 65 years. In addition, the hospital also offers health insurance covering different groups of people such as mass health care plus, mass health limited and children medical security plan. Massachusetts General Hospital offering healthcare insurance for people up to the...