Recently, the National Medical Insurance Bureau has uniformly deployed various provinces to carry out standardized governance of medical service prices, promote reasonable price reductions for some large-volume and high-priced inspection and testing items, further reduce the burden on patients to see doctors, and promote the relative balance of inspection and testing prices among provinces.

Which items will be focused on? At present, there are more than 2,000 inspection and testing items in various provinces across the country. Affected by factors such as information barriers, the prices of some items vary greatly in different provinces. For example, the thromboelastogram test, which is a test used to evaluate coagulation function, costs 360 yuan per time in some places and only 100 yuan per time in some places, which is several times different. The reason behind this is mainly that the procurement costs of some inspection reagents or equipment are inflated, resulting in "one price per region" and "one price per method". For example, the reagent kits used in the thromboelastogram test are 350 yuan per person and 60 yuan per person, which is nearly 6 times different, which has invisibly increased the burden on patients to see doctors. This time, the medical insurance department focused on the inspection items with large regional price differences, large procurement cost differences, and high cost proportions, and selected 4 inspection items, including thromboelastography test, glycated hemoglobin determination (diagnosis of diabetes and its control), B-type natriuretic peptide determination, and N-terminal B-type natriuretic peptide precursor determination (diagnosis of heart failure and its treatment effect), to carry out the first batch of price standardization management.

National price linkage, forced to reduce reagent prices Inspection and inspection items are an important part of medical services. The government sets the upper limit of charges, and the specific price level is set by the provinces and municipal medical insurance bureaus with price management authority. In order to reduce the burden on patients as soon as possible, standardize the prices of inspection items, and thus guide enterprises to reasonably lower the price of reagents, the National Medical Insurance Bureau analyzes the procurement costs of reagents and equipment for inspection items based on the price reduction of centralized procurement and the price comparison of different regions, and calculates the median and mode of the prices of inspection items in various provinces. Representative and guiding levels, provide them to various provinces as a reference anchor for local price management, which can not only cover the material consumption cost and leave room for rewarding the labor of inspection personnel, but also promote the relative coordination and balance of prices between regions.

Shanghai, Jiangxi, Qinghai and other provinces have taken the lead in implementing the deployment requirements. If the current price is higher than the expected target price, it will be directly lowered to the expected target price. Some provinces can also determine the actual price level based on economic development conditions, per capita income levels, and people's ability to pay. They can be tightened or appropriately lenient. As of November 1, 31 provinces across the country have issued documents to lower project prices, among which Shanghai, Jiangxi, Qinghai and other provinces have taken the lead in implementation. Preliminary estimates show that the average price reduction for a single project exceeds 40 yuan, which directly reduces the burden on patients and medical insurance funds. In the coming period, the National Medical Insurance Administration will carry out standardized management of inspection and testing prices in batches based on the decline in the procurement costs of inspection equipment and test reagents, and strive to directly reduce the burden on people to see a doctor. At the same time, the cost space freed up by reducing the inspection and testing prices will guide provinces that meet the price adjustment to use a certain proportion for special adjustments and optimization of the prices of nursing, outpatient, surgery and other projects, and also leave room for expenses to support high-level innovations that meet clinical needs, so that more new technologies, new equipment and new consumables can be accelerated into clinical applications, so that medical technology can benefit the people.

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