Optimal Pricing Strategy for Multichannel Healthcare Services

As a combination of online and offline channel services, multichannel healthcare services currently play important roles in helping consumers solve their health problems. In this study, we establish a stylized model to investigate how healthcare service providers should price in multi-channels and when consumers should choose online service, taking misdiagnosis rate and the severity of disease problems into account. Our results show that the prices of the online channel and offline channel can increase when the misdiagnosis rate is low and minor problem inspection rate online is high. Moreover, when the diagnosis rate is high, the profit of online channel would increase, and then improve the profit of multichannel service. These findings provide insights for the theoretical research of online healthcare service and practice management on pricing strategies in multichannel healthcare services.

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