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July 28, 2015

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Looking for health care system remedies

HANGZHOU has introduced 40 initiatives that it says will improve the health care of residents, from sending doctors into communities and giving hospitals more money for equipment purchases to digitalizing medical records.

“Some of these measures have already come into effect,” said Cui Weiwu, director of the Hangzhou Health and Family Planning Commission. “They aim to address common problems in the health care system.”

In the past, the best medical care was available in large urban hospitals. That meant people living in more outlying areas had to travel far for treatment or forego it altogether. At the same time, downtown hospitals were stretched beyond capacity.

Under the new initiatives, skilled doctors will be dispatched to county-area hospitals.

“All of the county-level hospitals have been allocated with doctors from top municipal hospitals, except Fuyang County People’s Hospital,” said Cui. “We are operating on a one-to-one system. For example, doctors from the Hangzhou No. 1 Hospital are dispatched to work only in Jiande No. 1 Hospital.”

At the same time, county-level hospitals are being allocated 1 million yuan (US$159,698) a year to buy advanced medical equipment and provide bonuses for the re-allocated doctors.

Doctors are also being dispatched to community clinics where they offer the more personalized services of a family physician.

In the past seven months, more than 500,000 residents have signed up as patients of 800 general practitioners, according to Cui.

Qiao Peng, a family doctor at the Nanxing Community Clinic, said the new system is working well.

“My team has two doctors and two nurses,” he said. “To date, we have signed up 900 residents. We visit their homes, often finding serious illnesses people didn’t even know they had. Though the system isn’t yet perfect, it certainly has enriched the level of care.”

Fees for home visits are now covered by government medical insurance.

“People are more willing to see a family doctor under the new plan,” said Qiao. “And more of them are accepting the fact that treatment in a community clinic is of good quality. Our outpatient visits have increased 20 percent.”

That means a reduced load for the big urban hospitals.

“Formerly, residents with minor illnesses went to see a doctor in big hospitals, which was a waste of medical resources,” Cui said. “The new system matches need with the availability of facilities.”

The medical system is also going online.

Mobile phone software called Wisdom Hangzhou now allows people to book appointments with doctors and get feedback on the results of physical exams.

In addition, government is proceeding with the establishment of digital medical records that will amass individual patient information that can be shared by every hospital.

“In the past, every hospital had its own software,” Cui said. “This new software integrates information from all urban hospitals, providing a centralized data base.”

The Hangzhou Health and Family Planning Commission has also set up an online platform to centralize information from across the city.

County hospital data have yet to be added to either system, but Cui said that will be coming.

The new initiatives also take aim at the chronic shortage of hospital beds, which sometimes forces minor-surgery patients to go home early. In obstetrics wards, pregnant women sometimes lie in corridors, waiting for a delivery room.

The new system allows cross-ward room allocations so that an empty bed in one department can be filled by a patient from another department.

To address the rising incidence of physical attacks on doctors when treatment is perceived to have gone wrong, the new measures provide for an insurance system that would compensate patients or their families for medical malpractice or in-hospital accidents.




 

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