Health services organizations place and price decisions

Your third assignment will be an analysis of the place and price decisions of a health services organization as covered in Week 5 and 6. You may use the same organization that was your focus on Written Assignment 2, or pick another health services organization with which you are familiar. Be sure you understand the marketing concepts discussed during Weeks 5 and 6 and can apply them to your organization.

You might have to seek out some information on the organization by visiting its website, or if it is an employer interviewing someone who has knowledge of the pricing and distribution decisions. After you have completed your research, answer each of the following questions in turn following all the general guidelines or written assignments posted in the syllabus.

Brief overview of the organizations service/products and a description of their target market. This is important to ensure that your analysis considers the needs of the target market in evaluating their pricing and channel decisions.
How do you think the organization arrives at its price? Refer to the Week 6 Overview for a framework of some of the pricing considerations and discuss those that appear relevant to your organization.
Do you think the pricing strategy is appropriate? Can it be improved to better meet its customer’s needs?
Is the organization hindered or helped in their pricing decisions by government or payer restrictions. If so, how do these restrictions impact their pricing strategy?
What kind of value delivery network does the organization employ, e.g. horizontal or vertical, and what is their distribution strategy, e.g. exclusive, intensive or intensive? What factors influence the distribution strategies of this organization? Are they customer-focused? If possible, outline all of the channel members and what function they perform to serve the customer?
Can you recommend any changes to the value delivery network that would serve customer needs better?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.