In daily life, we often find that although online drug purchase platforms provide convenient purchase channels and relatively low**, offline pharmacies often have much higher medicines**.
People often blame this phenomenon on the high operating costs of brick-and-mortar pharmacies, but that's just scratching the surface. In fact, the health insurance payment system plays a decisive role behind it.
The medical insurance payment system allows consumers to pay more attention to what they actually need to pay when buying drugs, rather than the price of the drugs.
In the environment of medical insurance payment, consumers are less sensitive to **, which provides offline pharmacies with room to increase profits.
Pharmacies can reduce pharmacists' fixed salaries and shift to sales performance as their primary income**, thereby making pharmacists more inclined to market high-margin drugs to consumers.
A white-collar worker in Shanghai went to the pharmacy to buy medicine because of a cold, but was recommended a combination of nearly 2,000 yuan.
This is not just an isolated case, but a phenomenon in which offline pharmacies use their direct interaction with consumers to encourage consumers to buy higher-profit drugs through professional pharmacist recommendations.
Some pharmaceutical companies prefer to cooperate with offline pharmacies rather than selling drugs on the platform.
This is because online sales will reduce the quality of the drug and affect its profitability. Some pharmaceutical companies may even choose to stop supplying to some online platforms and focus on cooperating with offline pharmacies instead.
High rent and labor costs are often cited as the main reasons for the high cost of offline pharmacies. However, this is only the appearance.
In fact, these pharmacies choose expensive street-level stores and commercial center locations, as well as hire more pharmacists, in order to increase the sales of medicines.
This strategy further drives up operating costs, creating a vicious circle: the higher the cost, the higher the drug**.
With the changes of the times, the continuous advancement of medical informatization construction is changing the market pattern.
Historically, the main barriers to the inability to pay for online drug purchases were the complexity of cross-regional and cross-departmental settlements and the difficulty of regulating fraud.
However, since 2009, China has begun to promote the construction of medical informatization, and by 2020, a unified national medical insurance information platform and personal health record file system have been put into construction.
This means that in the future, consumers can expect to buy medicines directly after their visit to the hospital, without having to go to a physical pharmacy. This change will create conditions for online medical insurance drug purchases, breaking the competitive advantage of brick-and-mortar pharmacies.
With the continuous advancement of medical informatization, the boundary between online and offline drug purchase will gradually blur. When e-commerce platforms and brick-and-mortar pharmacies compete on the same platform, who will be the ultimate winner? Can offline pharmacies still maintain their ** strategy as in the past?
With the in-depth promotion of medical informatization, drug consumption will be more convenient and fair. The rise of online drug purchases and the reform of the medical insurance payment system will work together to drive the market in a more rational direction.
For consumers, this means more choice and fairer things in the future**. For offline pharmacies, their business models and pricing strategies need to be revisited to adapt to the new market environment.
In this process, ensuring access to medicines and equity will be an important challenge and opportunity.