Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) yesterday proposed a new healthcare reimbursement system that he says would reward hospitals and clinics for curing patients while preventing waste of medical resources.
Under the current system, which reimburses hospitals and doctors for certain drug prescriptions, many patients are often prescribed medical treatments they don’t need.
Hospitals have little or no economic incentive to cure patients because once patients stop making appointments and receiving drug prescriptions, hospitals have less income, Yaung wrote in his latest “From the Health Minister” column on the department’s Web site.
“However, the more sick patients there are, the more money hospitals and clinics make, but the public does not benefit from this,” Yaung wrote. “When preventative measures and health education are done properly and people get sick less often, doctors don’t get the reward that they deserve.”
Yaung proposed a new system that would reimburse hospitals with a fixed amount of money based on the number of people with national health insurance living in that area. Whatever the amount of money the hospital saves on medical expenditures, the hospital gets to keep, he said.
For example, for a local hospital serving an area of 60,000 health-insured people, each with an estimated average medical expenditure of NT$20,000 a year, it would receive a fixed amount of reimbursement for the residents’ medical expenditure.
However, through the hospital’s efforts of integrated medical treatments and educating patients about regular exercise and healthy diets, the patients’ illnesses would come under control and the medical expenditure would decrease.
The hospital would be rewarded for its efforts by being allowed to keep the amount of money it has helped patients save on medical treatments.
He said that under this plan, people can still freely choose which hospital or clinic to visit, because the plan would have dozens of medical institutions in the same area working as one unit.
If the patient decides to visit a hospital outside the area, the patient would be deducted from that area’s reimbursement roster.
Health officials said that three hospitals have expressed interest in participating in a test-run of the project, which could begin as soon as January next year.
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