The National Health Commission met and covered county healthcare, high-end breakthroughs, bandwagon purchasing…
Promoting clinical specialities
These devices are in the spotlight
Today (19 October), the National Health Commission (NHC) held a press conference to introduce the reform and high-quality development of public hospitals and answer media questions.
At the meeting, Xue Haining, deputy director of the National Health Commission’s Physical Reform Department, introduced various initiatives to promote the high-quality development of public hospitals since the deepening of the healthcare reform, many of which are directly linked to the medical device industry.
The meeting proposed to vigorously promote the construction of national medical centres, national and provincial regional medical centres. Through initiatives such as expert support, technology levelling and homogenous management, local shortcomings and weaknesses in key diseases and specialties such as oncology and paediatrics will be filled.
Li Dachuan, deputy director of the Department of Medical Affairs of the NHSC, said at a press conference of the NHSC in April this year that as of the end of last year, the central government had invested a cumulative total of 2.54 billion yuan to support 508 national key clinical speciality construction projects nationwide.
In addition, the NHSC’s commissioned (managed) hospitals have set up national medical centres and national regional medical centres to self-finance and independently declare a total of 102 national key clinical speciality construction projects. At the same time, local finances have also been actively invested, with a total of more than 7 billion yuan invested to support 4,652 provincial-level clinical key speciality construction projects and 10,631 municipal (county) level clinical key speciality construction projects.
At this stage, China’s medical resources in different regions there are objective differences, and along with the high-quality development of public medical hospitals the gap is expected to narrow. At the same time, the medical device market will usher in a comprehensive expansion, a large number of products to obtain new volume opportunities.
County device market continues to grow
At the meeting, Xue Haining introduced the improvement of grassroots healthcare service capacity, the orderly promotion of the construction of urban medical groups and county medical communities, the accelerated implementation of the “1,000 counties project”, and the strengthening of rural and community medical and healthcare institutions.
At the local and municipal levels, the NHRC, in conjunction with the Ministry of Finance, has identified 30 cities in two batches to implement demonstration projects for public hospital reform and quality development. At the hospital level, 14 large high-level public hospitals have been selected to carry out pilot projects for high-quality development.
Xue Haining said that in the first batch of demonstration cities, the share of inpatient volume within the county in 2022 will increase from 72.9 per cent to 76.1 per cent on average, and the share of public hospitals participating in the mutual recognition of examination and test results at the same level will also increase from 83.3 per cent to 92.3 per cent on average.
In the process of high-quality development of public hospitals, the county market has seen a rapid explosion. According to the “Thousand Counties Project” County Hospital Comprehensive Capacity Enhancement Work Programme (2021-2025), at least 1,000 county hospitals nationwide will reach the level of tertiary hospital medical service capacity by 2025. In April last year, the General Office of the National Health Commission (NHSC) issued the “List of County Hospitals for Comprehensive Capacity Enhancement of County Hospitals under the “Thousand Counties Project”, in which 1,233 county hospitals were included.
In August this year, the National Health Commission issued the recommended health industry standard “county-level general hospital equipment configuration standards”, since 1 January 2024 officially come into force.
The standard applies to county-level general hospitals with no more than 1,500 beds in size, aims to standardise the configuration of equipment for county-level general hospitals, and stipulates the basic principles for the configuration of equipment with a value of 10,000 yuan and above. The configuration standards cover respiratory medicine, endocrinology, gastroenterology, neurosurgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, ophthalmology, etc., and involve a large number of medical equipments such as respiratory machines, high-frequency electrosurgical knives, defibrillators, electrocardiographs and so on.
According to the Ministry of Finance’s Report on the Implementation of the Central and Local Budgets in 2022 and the Draft Central and Local Budgets in 2023, support will be provided to improve the capacity of healthcare services in 2023. It will arrange financial assistance funds of 170 billion yuan through general transfer payments and use 30 billion yuan of funds carried over from the accrual system in 2022 to support local efforts such as epidemic prevention and control, with a focus on tilting to county-level finances.
Under a number of initiatives, the county medical market has been fully activated.
Driving breakthroughs in high-end devices
According to iiMedia Research and the Medical Device Blue Book, China is now the world’s second-largest medical device market and is climbing at a rate of about 10% per year. It is expected that the market size of China’s medical device industry will reach 184.14 billion yuan by 2025.
With such a huge scale, more and more domestic enterprises choose to enter the high-end field, and the high-quality development of public hospitals will provide a driving force for industrial upgrading.
At the meeting, Li Weimin, president of West China Hospital of Sichuan University, introduced the latest progress of West China Hospital, as a pilot hospital for high-quality development, in high-precision science and technology innovation.
Li Weimin said that in the past five years, West China Hospital has transformed more than 200 scientific and technological achievements, and the amount of the transformation contract is more than 1 billion yuan. In the way of modern diagnostic and therapeutic equipment, focusing on high-end electronic biochip technology, to solve the molecular diagnosis of the neck of the core technology; to solve the bottleneck technology of proton heavy ion therapy equipment, to achieve the localisation of high-end equipment.
In terms of high-end biomaterials, we have developed the world’s first fully-released recyclable interventional bio-aortic valve, solved the dilemma of interventional bio-aortic valve necklace, and quantitatively produced a number of domestic bio-tissue products, breaking the monopoly of imported high-end implantable medical devices.
In terms of minimally invasive technology for surgical treatment, we have developed minimally invasive interventional technology for geriatric valvular heart disease, which has high morbidity and great harm and seriously affects the quality of life and longevity of the elderly, thus cracking the problem of patients who cannot tolerate traditional open-heart surgery.
Li Weimin said, West China Hospital has set up a discipline development funds, annual investment of nearly 500 million yuan to support innovative drugs, innovative devices, innovative diagnostic and treatment options for clinical and translational research, and the establishment of the transformation of incentive mechanisms, the introduction of the formulation of the “West China transformation of the nine articles”, to encourage medical staff, scientific and technological personnel to carry out the transformation of innovation, and the transformation of its results 80% to 90% of the results of their transformation will be rewarded to the team, thus stimulating the transformation of the endogenous motivation of our researchers.
In recent years, the reputation of domestic high-end equipment has been steadily improving, to a large extent from the credit endorsement brought by the introduction and use of head hospitals such as Xiehe and West China. Through the combination of industry, academia and medicine, it will help more front-line clinical needs to meet more industrial R&D needs, and more innovations to be known to the clinics, thus opening up brand-new markets.
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Post time: Oct-26-2023