Medical Insurance Consumables Granted National Unified "ID"! Temporary Coding Channel Opened for Innovative Products

On the evening of September 12, the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) conducted an interpretation session on the classification rules for medical insurance consumables, inviting multiple experts to focus on seven categories of medical insurance consumables and provide specialized interpretations of their classification optimization work. This aims to help enterprises more clearly understand the details of the classification rules and effectively bridge the "last mile" of rule implementation.

For a long time, the naming of medical consumable products has lacked unified standards, with enterprises having significant autonomy in naming. This has led to phenomena in the market where products of different specifications and functions share the same name (different products with the same name), while some essentially identical products have multiple names (same product with different names). This has added difficulties to precise medical insurance payments, fund supervision, and the bidding and procurement of consumables by medical institutions.

Therefore, establishing a standardized and unified medical insurance generic name system, grouping consumables with similar functions and minimal differences in clinical value, and reasonably determining medical insurance generic names are of great significance for promoting the establishment of a medical insurance access system for medical consumables and enabling more scientific, precise, and efficient medical insurance payments.

"As is well known, the classification of medical insurance consumables is extremely challenging due to their complex specifications and models, diverse product categories, and the large number of involved production and operation enterprises. Thus, it has once been the toughest 'hard nut to crack' in medical insurance information business coding," said Zhao Xiuzhu, Deputy Director of the Big Data Center of the NHSA, during the interpretation session.

Reporters from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily learned at the session that to tackle this "hard nut," the NHSA first established a medical insurance consumables information database based on "established criteria for database construction, categorized content, and standardized data."

"The optimized and adjusted classification system can more objectively reflect the functional patterns and characteristics of various consumables, effectively addressing issues such as difficulty in product identification, differentiation, and management. This further enhances the precision, standardization, and scientific level of medical insurance management," Zhao Xiuzhu stated.