The General Office of the State Council has recently issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Establishment and Development of the Medical Consortium (the "Opinions").
The Opinions set forth that the year 2017 will see the pilot establishment of the medical consortium of various forms initiated in all fields, with participation of all Class 3 public hospitals, and as a result, at least one consortium bringing remarkable effects shall have been established in each city under the jurisdiction of a province subject to the integrated pilot medical reform and in the city where the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment model is tried; and full progress will be made in setting up the consortium in 2020. The Opinions call for shaping the mode of consortium organizations in various forms step by step, improving the mechanism for distributing and coordinating responsibilities within hospitals under partnerships, and promoting the balanced allocation of quality medical resources within a medical consortium from top to bottom. Moreover, the Opinions state that efforts will be made to explore ways to set up a uniform platform for the bidding, procurement and management of drugs within a medical consortium, shaping a mechanism of circulating prescriptions and sharing and distributing drugs within a medical consortium, appropriately widening the gap between grassroots medical and health institutions, hospitals at the county level and major urban hospitals in respect of the degree of medical expense reimbursement, and exploring to apply multiple ways of payment, such as covering all expenses by the medical insurance to the mode of coordinated and distributed responsibilities under which vertical partnership are formed among hospitals.