Dr Som Bhatia was watching the lush green yet deserted playgrounds of Eco Park from his white Audi while cruizing along biswas bangle sarani that connected NSCBI Airport with Saltlake Sector V via New town in the City of Joy, Kolkata. He turned towards Dr Anisha Roy and said: Can you just imagine an empty Eco park in the middle of May, when most of the schools are enjoying summer vacation?

Dr Anisha silently nodded her head. Kolkata was not new to her since she was born in a house on Amherst Street. However, her mind was preoccupied with the problem posed by Dr Bhatia. He is the director of a multi-speciality hospital called ICS which had branches in Dum-Dum, Howrah and Salt-lake. Although, the hospital treated patients of all illnesses, their Salt lake branch had speciality in Bariatric Surgery and ICS was a very popular hospital among Kolkatans. On an average, they conducted 200 bariatric surgeries every month and were in the process of increasing the monthly capacity to 400 bariatric surgeries. But suddenly on April 2020, as per Government instructions, their Salt lake branch was designate as one of the COVID treatment centres.

Case Scenario

There are many decisions that Dr Som has to take − whether to use package pricing or traditional pricing for covid treatment? Should package pricing be offered to all types of treatments if they plan to have package pricing strategy? How should one come up with the package pricing and how to use package pricing as a competitive strategy in the market since he was expecting many new hospitals to come up in Kolkata in the next couple of years.

Case Summary

In this short and hypothetical case study, a decision game has been constructed using predictive modelling. Set in the backdrop of COVID-19, the protagonist is the director of a multi-speciality hospital that has been turned into covid treatment facility. The director is trying to make a pricing decision by discussing the same with his fellow consultant of the hospital. The options are whether the patient will be charged a flat package rate for covid treatment or should it be proportionate to the ventilator usage based on patient’s body weight. The users of this game will be encouraged to apply linear regression in order to take management decisions. They would also engage in checking the existence of heteroscedasticity and its effects on the gaming decisions.

Disclaimer

The authors declare no conflict of interest. This case is strictly for academic use and should not be used in commercial terms. All the characters in the case are fictional and any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental. The data used is this case is simulation generated and no living creatures were harmed due to the process.

Full Case Study catalogued by Harvard Law School PON Research Paper Series and freely available at Elsevier SSRN DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3643378. Co-Authored by Kaushik Ghosh.