Materia Medica Malaysiana

Cost-cutting system on healthcare financing

Kuala Lumpur: The Health Ministry will introduce a case-mix system as soon as possible to reduce costs in healthcare financing in the country.

Health Minister Datuk Chua Jui Meng said that under the system, patients would know in advance the costs and the duration of the treatment as everything would be laid down.

The government and other healthcare financiers would have a structure of disease conditions and would be able to determine the costs and funding a hospital needed to attend to each type of disease, he told reporters after opening the first international case-mix conference, organised by Hospital Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (HUKM) here Monday.

He said the system would also help hospitals to be more appropriately funded in the future and to better manage their care costs.

Chua said the present system of funding hospitals was based on bed strength and the previous year’s budget.

“We realise that we have to find ways to control the costs, over-usage of medication and over-servicing of patients in the private and public hospitals,” he said.

He said, for example, the Health Ministry’s budget increased to RM7.6 billion or 7.1 per cent of the national budget this year compared to RM1 billion or 3.6 per cent of the national budget in 1983.

HUKM took the initiative to implement the system in July last year to improve its services and resource management, and the outcome had been reported to be good, he said.

The pilot project of the system would be tested soon in 12 hospitals in the country, and if found effective would be extended to other hospitals, he said.

The hospitals are the three university hospitals of UKM (Cheras), USM (Kubang Kerian, Kelantan) and UM (Petaling Jaya) and nine government hospitals throughout the country.

Chua said the mechanism of the case-mix system was first started by Prof Bob Fetter and Prof Jon Thomson from Yale University in 1980 before spreading to Europe, Australia and Asian countries of Singapore, Thailand and Japan.

The government first studied the system in 1996 under a RM2.2 million research project, he said.

The research was carried out by a team from the Health Ministry, Universiti Malaya, Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.- Bernama