Efforts to persuade individuals not to buy, or to go elsewhere. A hospital has a serious problem when the price set for a given Diagnosis Related Group (DRG) under the prospective payment system (PPS) is lower than the lowest cost the hospital can achieve for care for a patient with that DRG and still maintain quality. Under those circumstances, the hospital may elect to discontinue caring for such patients (for example, pediatrics). Alternatively, it may develop some more subtle strategy to discourage patients with a problem which falls into the DRG from coming to that hospital, or to discourage physicians from bringing such patients. The latter efforts have been labelled “demarketing.”