(Yicai) Sept. 8 -- China will set up a healthcare insurance access system for medical consumables and gradually build a unified national catalog of items in the system, as it previously did for drugs.

Payments for consumables covered by the medical insurance system should follow the principle of separating technical labor and materials consumption, a notice issued by the National Healthcare Security Administration said recently. Disposable medical consumables should be gradually included in the scope of medical insurance payment management, it said.

The notice’s contents were not dissimilar to those of the official draft for comments released in May, said Zhao Heng, founder of medical strategy consultants Latitude Health.

The document clarifies the three main principles of medical consumables management: common name management, a medical insurance access catalog, and separation of technical labor and material consumption for payments, helping the medical insurance system to defly manage payments for consumables, Zhao pointed out.

Medical consumables are many and different, so they will have millions or tens of millions of codes, compared to only tens of thousands of drug codes, said Liang Hong, a professor in Fudan University’s public policy school.

But once the unified coding of consumables is completed, ‘one product, one code’ can be achieved, helping government departments manage such items and reduce the burden on manufacturers, Liang noted.

The reform will lay the foundation for future price negotiations on consumables covered by the insurance system, according to Zhao. If a new product is not innovative, its price in the system will be adjusted according to that of existing items without chance of repricing, Zhao added. 

But if there is no existing item, manufacturers launching new items need to apply to regulators for a new product code and negotiate the price based on its innovation, curative effect, and the number of applicable patients, Zhao pointed out.

Since its establishment in 2018, the NHSA has been committed to promoting the informatization of healthcare insurance. After completing the National Unified Healthcare Insurance Information Platform in March, it has pushed the standardization of drug and consumable codes to promote their use in bidding, procurement, and settlement.

More than 95 percent of diagnoses and treatments at medical institutions use medical consumables, with related outlays equivalent to 15 percent to 20 percent of the revenue at large comprehensive medical institutions, and growing each year.

The Chinese market for rapidly updated high-value medical consumables is growing 26 percent a year, much faster than the country's 6 percent annual economic growth and 15 percent annual increase in medical expenses.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev