The National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) has released a new notification on medical service pricing management, effective immediately. The policy aims to stabilize and orderly manage medical service pricing, enhance public welfare in basic medical services, promote innovation, and ensure high-quality, efficient, and affordable healthcare for the public.
Key Policies
- Public Welfare Focus: Emphasizes the public welfare nature of public medical institutions, reflecting it in specific projects, prices, and policies.
- Dynamic Adjustment Mechanism: Establishes a dynamic pricing adjustment system aligned with economic, social, and medical insurance fund trends. Provincial-level rules will standardize adjustment procedures and triggers.
- Technical Labor Prioritization: Prioritizes price adjustments for services with high technical labor value (over 60% of price composition), especially in treatment, surgery, and traditional Chinese medicine. These will account for >60% of adjustments.
- High-Risk Services: Allows appropriate price differentials for technically difficult, high-risk but essential services.
New Service Projects
- Accelerates review of new medical service pricing projects, with fast-track approval for major innovations in diagnosis/treatment of critical diseases or fill the gap in diagnosis and treatment.
Clarifying Functional Roles
- Price vs. Procurement: Decouples price adjustments from centralized drug/consumable procurement. For items where consumables are separately charged, low-priced items will be Priority should be given to dynamic adjustments after inflated prices are squeezed out If consumables are included in service prices, medical service prices may be reduced to pass on cost savings.-Fineline Info & Tech
