Doctors at Bac Ninh Traditional Medicine Hospital scan health insurance card for a patient (Photo: VNA)Hanoi (VNA) – Incomplete data is among the issues hindering the
application of in health insurance, according to a
report by the Ministry of Health’s Health Insurance Department.
As part of a health insurance medical information system rolled
out last June and described as the optimal solution to ensure transparency and
prevent insurance fraud, the transmission of electronic data in health
insurance management and payment is facing challenges due to continuous changes
in local health service facilities, said the report.
These were changes to technical and medical equipment, medicine
and other health related items.
Others issues, according to the report, relate to the difficulties
in hiring IT service companies to help health insurance agencies follow the
Government’s rules on using information systems in health insurance.
In particular, some documents issued by Vietnam Health Insurance
are not synchronised with the ’s instructions on the hiring
of IT companies to install medical infomation systems for health insurance
management and payment
The problems were found mostly at health insurance authorities at
grass-root levels where many staff lack qualifications to record data about
patients’ tests and treatments and therefore information transmitted to social
insurance agencies for payment is often not sufficiently clear, said the
report.
A lack of both quantity and quality of IT facilities such as
computers and network servers at local health insurance agencies is also
hindering the application of IT in their management works.
A majority of hospitals and clinics have not installed information
medical systems with a capacity to import the required data, which often
includes many figures.
Moreover, most health care workers have not been trained in IT and
find it hard to adapt to the medical information system.
Deputy Minister of Health Le Tuan, told the Vietnam Economic Times
recently that although this year was promoted as the threshold year for
implementing the National Assembly’s resolution on boosting the linkage of
health care data between healthcare systems and health insurance and social
insurance, the connection is still very limited due to problems in sending and
receiving data.
According to another report delivered
by Pham Luong Son, Deputy Director General of the Vietnam Social Security
at a conference held in January, 99.5 percent of medical facilities nationwide
have been linked to the medical information assessment
system since its launch, except for 65 commune-level health stations in
remote areas without electricity access.
The health insurance medical information
assessment system received some 68.9 million dossiers requesting insurance
payments worth 35 trillion VND (1.55 billion USD) in the last six months of
2016, and another 3 million requesting insurance payments of 2 trillion VND (88.6
million USD) in the first month of 2017, the report said.-VNA
Source: VietnamPlus
