The State Council recently released a circular to beef up performance assessment of the tertiary hospitals, in a bid to facilitate their managerial transformation from the previous quantitative growth mode to qualitative development mode and administrative mode to an all-around performance assessment mode.

A system for the performance assessment of public hospitals will come into force as of 2019 and achieve substantial development by 2020, along with corresponding indicator system, standardized support system, and information system on national and provincial levels, according to the circular.

The indicator system of the performance assessment consists of 55 indicators, 26 out of which were designated as national supervision indicators, falling into 4 categories — medical standards, operation efficiency, sustainable development, and satisfaction evaluation.

Premium medical services are the key task for the tertiary hospitals to fulfill. Assessment for medicals service quality and safety will be conducted based on indicators including medicals service quality control, reasonable dosages, and more.

China has a three-tier system to grade hospitals, with tertiary hospitals — which have the largest number of beds and provide comprehensive medical services — at the top of the list.

The indicator of targeted disease treatment service will enable departments concerned to assess the medicals service quality and safety for key diseases and technologies.

In terms of operation efficiency, the ratio of human resources distribution and workload indicator will be used to assess the utilization of medical resources. Meanwhile, economic management indicator will act as the standard for the economic management of the hospitals.

Multiple approaches will be taken to assess the sustainable development of hospitals, highlighting the indicator of talent structure for assessing the medical personnel stability, research-to-practice indicator for innovation, among others.

As for satisfaction evaluation, patients as well as medical staff will both take part to evaluate the sense of gain of the medical treatment receivers and initiatives of medical professionals.

The standardized support system, as the circular said, will take into account the medical record front page standardization, unified codes and terminology, improvements in medical feedback platforms, and performance assessment systems.

Hospitals should step up the digitalization work with electronic medical record at the core, standardizing the front pages of medical records, cementing the standard and regulative management of clinic data.

The National Health Commission and the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine will introduce collections of unified codes of disease classification, codes of operations, and medical lexicons by the end of March, 2019. These collections will come into force by the end of August, 2019.

In addition, the tertiary hospitals will all be included into the satisfaction survey platform of the National Health Commission by the end of March, 2019.

The National Health Commission will establish a system for medical performance assessment by the end of March, 2019. And corresponding provincial-level systems will come into place by the end of June, 2019, interconnected with the national one.

The initial annual national medical performance assessment will materialize by the end of December, 2019. And the initial annual provincial-level assessments will be done by the end of February, 2019.

Additionally, the National Health Commission will conclude the national data analysis of the medical indicators by the end March, 2019.