Beijing rolls out e-certificates for medical services

Beijing residents can use their electronic certificates of social security to access medical services at all designated hospitals across the city from Jan 1 without the need to take the social security cards along with them.

Beijing Municipal Medical Insurance Bureau issued a notice Wednesday on adopting the e-certificate for medical services and payment, which allows users to get their e-certificates to make payments more swiftly and conveniently.

An official in charge of the bureau said that local authorities have prepared a lot for the launch in the past year under the COVID-19 pandemic, and more than 2,900 designated medical institutions got their system upgraded and approved.

The adoption will make Beijing the first mega city to use the e-certificates to cover all insured people, all designated medical institutions and all kinds of medical fees, since the country launched a trial in November 2019.

At present, Beijing residents must take their social security cards while going to hospitals, and if not, the medical expenses are not reimbursed immediately, or they have to go to social insurance agencies for manual reimbursement.

To apply for manual reimbursement, insured people have to keep their cards at the social insurance agencies, but when they are ill and need to go to hospital, they have to pay the expenses themselves first. It becomes a vicious circle.

"To make it convenient, the city updated the social security system to make it available for real-time information check of insured people, which improves the payment efficiency," the official said.

From 2021, insured people will not have to keep their cards or e-certificates at the social insurance agencies for manual reimbursement.

It is the first step to allow insured people to use e-certificates for offline payment or making online payment on hospital apps, and the next is to make the payment through a facial recognition system, according to the official.

Beijing residents can apply for and activate the e-certificate on the city's Beijingtong app, official app for national healthcare security, certified third-party apps such as WeChat and Alipay or banking apps.

The e-certificates were issued by an information platform of the National Healthcare Security Administration, containing such kinds of functions as self-service enquiry and e-payment.