Retrospective study on drug’s centralized purchasing system of healthcare institutions in China / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

In this paper, a systematical and retrospective review was made on how the drug purchasing system of Chinese healthcare institutions has evolved from decentralized purchasing to centralized purchasing based on four stages as budding stage, initial stage, adjustment stage and deepening stage. In each stage, the working characteris-tics, achievements and problems have been analyzed. Targeting at the problems and challenges confronted with cur-rent drug purchasing, recommendations was made to reform and improve public hospitals’ centralized purchasing sys-tem, such as persisting centralized purchasing online at provincial level, sticking to “four favorable” principles, breaking through the mechanism of compensating medical cost with drug-selling profits, promoting coordinated inter-action reforms in healthcare insurances, distribution and pricing, strengthening comprehensive services and supervi-sion, etc.