Harbin residents benefit from medial reform

Harbin residents now enjoy much better medical services thanks to the city’s recent medical reforms which were introduced on Aug1.

Information from Harbin health care authorities reveals that the basic public health subsidy saw a per person increase to 50 yuan ($7.54), five yuan more than in 2016, while financial assistance for residents’ medical insurance increased to 450 yuan a year.

As of Aug. 1, all public hospitals in Harbin are participating in the comprehensive reform program, which ends the 60-year-old practice of drug price markups and enables rationalization of medical costs. As reforms have been implemented, drug sales as a share of total revenue for hospitals dropped from 46.3 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2017.

Reforms in the pricing of medical services will continue to move towards dynamic price adjustments to better reflect the expertise of medical workers, with reforms prescribing a maximum 7.08 percent growth rate.

A new price information mechanism will also be able track drug prices in the public hospital system.

Additionally, Harbin marked more than 100 disease categories for an insurance payment-by-category reform.

Harbin has also established electronic health records for about 70 percent of its residents. More efforts will be made to expand the availability of family doctors, with health center doctors fielding patient questions online and visiting patients regularly.