In China, smartphone apps help prescriptions reach patients

China’s healthcare system is notorious for “Yi Yao Yang Yi”, a long-time unspoken policy allowing hospitals to gain finical benefits through selling prescriptions. Such a policy is widely criticized as a major cause for briberies and high drug prices, so gradually erasing it is one major goal for China’s ongoing healthcare reform, writes The Pharma Letter’s correspondent Wang Fangqing.

Some measures are already taken. For example, China now allows its physicians to work at multiple hospitals and clinics, partly to improve the quality of healthcare services and partly to cut the tie between hospitals and physicians. Until 2015, most of Chinese physicians were only allowed to work as full-time employees.

In 2014, China’s Food and Drug Administration published a draft of supervision methods of selling prescriptions online, a sign that the country finally is ready to allow third parties to benefit from its enormous prescriptions market, which is valued as large as 800 billion renminbi ($121.4 million), according to a Shanghai-based financial service provider Wind.