Efforts to be made to accelerate mutual recognition of clinical examination results

More efforts will be made to accelerate mutual recognition of clinical examination results between different medical institutions, to further improve medical services and patients' experience, China's top health authorities have said.

Measures should be taken to further incentivize and supervise the mutual recognition of clinical examination results by different medical institutions, with an eye on quality, safety and patients' actual conditions, the National Health Commission said in a guideline it issued recently.

The guideline sets a goal that by the end of 2027, clinical test results of more than 300 items be shared and recognized by medical institutions within the same provincial-level region; while by 2030, the standards of clinical tests will be further aligned, and common clinical test results will be shared and accepted by different medical institutions across regions.

"Clinical test is a crucial part of medical services. Promoting the sharing and mutual recognition of test results among medical institutions is conducive to boosting the utilization efficiency of medical resources, controlling costs, and upgrading medical services," said Jiao Yahui, director of the medical administration department of the National Health Commission, at a news conference on Wednesday.

Currently, 24 provinces have more than 100 clinical test items that can be shared and accepted among the hospitals within the province, with the number of such items in Beijing, Jiangsu and Zhejiang reaching 481, 478 and 443, respectively.

Clinical test results are also being shared across provinces, said Jiao, citing a program that medical examination results of 60 items can be mutually shared and recognized by over 1,100 medical institutions in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and Jiangsu.

The quality and standard of clinical tests are key to enhancing the mutual recognition of test results among hospitals. In light of this, Beijing has been beefing up quality control and standards alignment of clinical tests.

Li Ang, deputy director of Beijing Municipal Health Commission, said that Beijing has established a quality control network covering city-level and district-level hospitals, issued a series of quality control standards, and strengthened online monitoring and offline guidance to ensure homogenous quality standards of clinical tests by different institutions.

Building an online platform for sharing clinical test results is a pivotal step yet also a difficult point in the process, said Li. Now, many places have been working consistently to digitalize medical services and improve the connectivity of patients' clinical test results by different institutions.

For example, all of the 1,966 public medical institutions in Jiangsu province have been connected to the online medical image platform. In Zhejiang province, all major public hospitals, community healthcare centers as well as township hospitals, are connected to the online mutual recognition system.

In Beijing, most tertiary hospitals, the most advanced level in China's three-tiered hospital system, can access patients' clinical test results online. The online system can automatically remind doctors of the mutually recognized items when they order tests. And doctors can retrieve patients' recent examination results and image data in other medical institutions, without requiring them to carry printed ones, Li introduced.

Besides, Jiao reminded us that there are situations where test results cannot be recognized by different hospitals, which might be due to patients' physiological metabolism, the progression of the disease and discrepancies in the testing equipment and testing reagents.

Under such circumstances, medical workers should strengthen their communication with patients by explaining the reasons clearly and seeking for their understanding, Jiao added.

Xu Nuo contributed to this story.