Starting on December 1st, Nanjing began to implement the "dual-channel" management policy for drugs in the national medical insurance negotiations to ensure that insured will get substantive help.
"Dual-channel" refers to the inability to prescribe the medicine needed by inpatients in the hospital in time, and doctors can prescribe the drug through the "dual-channel" system of drug negotiation through the national medical insurance.
The hospital reviews the prescription, and then the pharmacy reviews and confirms the order before delivering it to the hospital for free, which means that the hospital has increased the capacity of the pharmacy.
For patients, this means that they can directly use their medical insurance card to settle the self-paid part in the hospital according to the hospitalization benefits.
At present, Nanjing has included more than 100 kinds of national negotiation drugs under "dual channel" management, covering diseases such as malignant tumors, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis.
The National Healthcare Security Administration announced on Dec 3 that seventy-four drugs for treating rare diseases, COVID-19 and some major chronic diseases will be added to China's national insurance drug list from the start of next year while 11 drugs that have proved relatively ineffective and replaceable will be removed.
Following negotiations that began in October, the prices of 67 of the newly included drugs will be reduced by an average of 61.7 percent.
The updated list will cover 2,860 drugs---1,486 of them Western ones and the others traditional Chinese herbs or drugs made from them.
Eighteen of the 74 newly added drugs target cancer, two are used for treating COVID-19 pneumonia, 15 treat infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C, and seven others treat rare diseases such as hereditary angioedema, which causes unexpected swelling in various parts of the body, including the extremities, the gastrointestinal tract and the upper airways.
The national insurance drug list has been adjusted annually over the past four years, with 507 new drugs having been added to it.
