The long-standing dilemma of difficulties in the improvement of primary care in China has led to county-level medical alliances reforms in various regions throughout the country.
To analyze the combination of pathways that contribute to improving the service capabilities of county-level medical alliances, providing a reference for the improvement and promotion of county-level medical alliances.
CNKI and Wanfang Data Knowledge Service Platform were searched by using "county-level medical alliance" "county health care unit" as keywords from 2020-01-01 to 2022-11-26 to obtain 662 related papers, a total of 9 papers and 11 cases were selected in the analysis. Based on literature review and policy analysis, variables including scale of planning and implementation, close organizational structure, collaborative management system, information platform integration, regional resources sharing, medical insurance payment reform, and incentive mechanism design were identified as outcome variables, while the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used to identify multiple realization pathways for the service capability improvement of county-level medical alliances.
Four combinations of pathways were found to improve the service capability of county-level medical alliances. Pathway S1: planning and implementation scale * close organizational structure * collaborative management system * regional resources sharing * medical insurance payment reform * incentive mechanism design. Pathway S2: close organizational structure * collaborative management system * information platform integration * regional resources sharing * medical insurance payment reform * incentive mechanism design. Pathway S3: smaller scale of planning and implementation * close organizational structure * collaborative management system * non-integrated information platform * non-sharing of regional resources * medical insurance payment reform * incentive mechanism design. Pathway S4: smaller scale of planning and implementation * close organizational structure * collaborative management system * non-integrated information platform * regional resource sharing * medical insurance payment reform * no incentive mechanism design.
The improvement of service capability of county-level medical alliances needs to focus on close organizational structure, establish management system focusing on the collaboration of departments and member institutions, and promote medical insurance payment reform such as total budget management system of medical insurance funds and diagnosis related groups (DRGs) .
Focusing on primary care is the primary content of health care policies, however, there is a lack of effective measurement tools in practice.
To construct a index system for county health system development focusing on primary care, provide a reference for its monitoring approaches, and perform analysis and presentation with application cases.
In the study conducted from 2021 to 2022, the index system, weights and percentage conversion methods were constructed based on literature review and Delphi method, case application and analysis were conducted based on the data of questionnaire survey, institutional survey and medical insurance collected by baseline survey among residents, patients and medical workers, as well as data of key informant interview, in 2 experimental counties of county health system reform in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region from 2020 to 2022.
The results of Delphi method showed that the authority coefficient of experts was 0.91, the coefficients of variation of two rounds of consultation were 0.14 and 0.13, respectively. The final constructed index system contains 3 domains, 15 dimensions, and 36 indicators, with a comprehensive index calculation method. The results showed that the overall scores for the two counties in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region were 58.62 and 52.57, respectively, both of which were below the current national benchmark (60.00 points) .
Based on the data availability, the index system constructed in this study can be applied to monitor and evaluate county health system to achieve the goal of focusing on primary care, its application may improve visibility and priority of primary care development, facilitate the publish and implementation policies strengthening primary care.
Coordinated regional health development aims to optimize resource allocation by constructing a well-structured and functional regional collaborative system to provide continuous medical services, and to leverage the unique features and strengths of medical centers and community health centers within a region via fully integrating resources and sharing information. However, current available systems for assessing coordinated regional health development mainly focus on outcomes, which are relatively non-diversified and unsystematic, thus further research is required to fill this gap.
We aimed to construct an evaluation system for coordinated regional health development, to provide scientific evidence for evaluating the coordinated development capacities of regions.
We collected essential factors related to coordinated regional health development through a literature review and semi-structured interviews, and used them to construct a draft version of the Coordinated Regional Health Development Assessment System (CRHDAS) . Then we selected 19 experts who were familiar with coordinated regional health development (engaging in general medicine, medical education, administrative management, and public health management) from Shanghai to attend two rounds of online combined with offline Delphi questionnaire surveys from December 2020 to March 2021 to determine the weights of the indicators and test the logical consistency of the weights of indicators at each level using Analytic Hierarchy Process. After that, we established the final version of CRHDAS.
The effective response rate and authoritative coefficient were 95.0% and 0.87, respectively, for the first round of survey, and were 100.0% and 0.92, respectively, for the second round of survey. The CRHDAS consists of four first-level indicators (with corresponding weights of 0.387, 0.296, 0.187 and 0.130) , 12 second-level indicators, and 31 third-level indicators. The consistency ratios for the weights of three levels of indicators are <0.100.
The CRHDAS is of high-level scientificity and practicality, which can help identify problems and deficiencies of the collaboration mode between community health centers, providing a theoretical and practical basis for guiding coordinated regional health practice in the future.
