China to shift towards quality development for public hospitals

It also called for deepened reforms of medical service pricing.

China plans to shift its public hospitals from focusing on scale expansion to quality and efficiency improvement in five years, Xinhua reported based on a guideline on promoting the development of public hospitals.

The document, issued by the country’s General Office of the State Council, laid out six key tasks.

In particular, it seeks to boost the development of clinical medicine, push innovations in medical technologies and services, and give more play to information technology.

It also called for deepened reforms of medical service pricing and medical insurance payment models.

A raft of hospitals at the national and provincial level are in the pipeline, and a multi-level treatment network for major epidemic diseases will be established and improved, the guideline stated.