The key to the implementation of grassroots medical consortia: medical informatization
2024-08-15
Medical consortium refers to a regional medical consortium that integrates medical resources within the same region. It is usually composed of tertiary hospitals, secondary hospitals, community hospitals, and village hospitals within a region to form a medical consortium. The purpose is to solve the problem of difficult access to medical care for the people, and to establish a diagnosis and treatment model with graded medical care, differentiated treatment for urgent and slow cases, and two-way referral.
On October 9th, Premier Li Keqiang presided over a State Council executive meeting and listened to a report on the progress of the comprehensive reform of public hospitals and the construction of medical consortia. Through deepening medical reform and optimizing resource allocation to ensure people's health, he deployed further efforts to improve the national networking of basic medical insurance and direct settlement of medical treatment in other places.
The meeting made it clear that the next step of medical reform will comprehensively promote the work of medical reform from four main aspects, namely, improving the new operating mechanism of public hospitals, promoting the construction of medical consortia with the reform of system and mechanism, focusing on tackling key problems in the treatment of difficult and high-risk cancers, solving problems with "Internet plus medicine", and accelerating the promotion of telemedicine, appointment diagnosis and treatment, daytime surgery and other medical service modes.
Current situation of medical consortia
By September of this year, all public hospitals across the country have carried out comprehensive reforms and gradually established new mechanisms to maintain public welfare, mobilize enthusiasm, and ensure sustainable operation. Efforts have been made to eliminate the practice of using medication to supplement medical expenses and streamline medical service prices. The drug markup policy, which has been in place for over 60 years, has been abolished. The proportion of medication in hospital revenue has decreased from 46.3% at the beginning of the new round of medical reform in 2010 to 38.1% in 2016. The proportion of personal health expenditure to total health expenses for residents has decreased from 40.4% in 2008 to below 30% in 2016. 65% of public hospitals at or above the second level have implemented a reform of medical insurance payment based on disease types, resulting in a continuous decrease in patients' medical burden. The construction of medical consortia has made positive progress, with nearly 90% of tertiary hospitals participating in the pilot of medical consortia and achieving mutual recognition of examination and testing results among hospitals at the same level. More than 80% of residents can seek medical treatment nearby within 15 minutes, making it more convenient for the public to enjoy high-quality medical services.
It cannot be denied that in an ideal environment, medical consortia can indeed achieve collaboration and resource sharing among medical institutions at different levels, improving the efficiency of healthcare resource utilization. There are also successful cases of regional tiered diagnosis and treatment networks in the United States and Canada. Therefore, what we need to do is to balance the interests of all parties and run the medical consortium well.
To achieve this goal, the first question to be solved is, what is the cohesion of building this medical consortium? That is to say, can the interests and demands of all parties involved in the medical consortium, including the government, hospitals, primary healthcare institutions, doctors, and the general public, be well met.
The government hopes to strengthen the grassroots level, achieve hierarchical diagnosis and treatment within the medical ecosystem, and control medical expenses; Large hospitals require a stable source of patients and an improvement in the level of medical services; Grassroots medical institutions should improve their diagnosis and treatment capabilities and increase medical income; Doctors hope to have their professional value reflected reasonably and achieve long-term career development; The common people hope that the problem of difficult and expensive medical treatment can be solved.
