The International Social Security Association (ISSA) together with the Social Security Organisation of Malaysia (SOCSO) hosted the ISSA Regional Social Security Forum for Asia and the Pacific from October 2 to 4, 2018 in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). The Vietnamese delegation was led by Vietnam Social Security Deputy General Director Dao Viet Anh.
Mr YB Tuan M. Kulasegaran, Minister of Human Resources of Malaysia, said that in the past years, the importance of social security system for people and economic development has become clearer. Caring for social security is investing in human resources in order to work more effectively. This solution also aims to improve quality of life and equality in the community, thereby helping maintain socioeconomic stability.
In fact, the coverage of social security systems in the world is still limited, especially in Asia where more than one billion people are still vulnerable. They are farmers, fishermen, freelancers or part-time workers who lack proper protection of the social security system.
Attending the discussion session, Deputy Chairman of the Institute of Social Science (under the Vietnam Social Security) Nguyen Thi Hong Van revealed achievements of the Vietnamese social security system in expanding and developing health insurance participation to raise the coverage ratio in recent years; the announced list of medicines and smart medical devices with regulatory ratio and payment conditions; results of the drug price control as a result of medicine tender reform and publicity of drug and smart medical device prices on the electronic information website of the Vietnam Social Security and drug tenders launched by the Ministry of Health and the Vietnam Social Security; major changes in hospital fees to change the health financing mechanism to shift financial subsidies to the health care system directly funded by the State budget to medical facilities with revenues sourced from the delivery of health services to enhance healthcare quality and ensure benefits for patients; and information technology application in social security management in Vietnam.
Mr Duong Tuan Duc, Director of the Northern Centre for Health Insurance Inspection and Multi-line Payment, said that health insurance is one of the two main pillars of the social security system in Vietnam, which is the main financial mechanism for providing healthcare for people. The insured are covered by most health services with over 40,000 medicines and medical devices and nearly 18,000 technical services. From 2015, patients are entitled for medical care and treatment at all district-level health facilities. In addition, payment methods for healthcare services are largely based on public service rates which are challenging hospitals that are operated under self-financing mechanisms to assess and settle payments for medical care costs.
To solve these issues, in 2015 and 2016, Vietnam Social Security focused on building the health insurance assessment information system, setting up a data link system with nearly 14,000 medical facilities nationwide, and forming a shared use list. Besides, it standardised output data to obtain information from various medical software installed by medical facilities and built a set of assessment rules, and analysing and forecasting functions, for healthcare costs.
From 2017, Vietnam Social Security officially operated the health insurance assessment information system which helps interconnecting online data, information sharing, treatment results and patient disease development for medical facilities, and provides functions for medical facilities to manage health care, check health insurance information, track referrals, receptions and responses of assessment results online. Accordingly, 100 per cent of applications for payment are checked through inspection rules; invalid claims for payment or claims beyond health insurance or replicated claims are automatically rejected; or applications in need of active assessment are alerted. Health-insured medical service database is centrally managed, automatically processed, analysed, compared and assessed on the use of funds, disease patterns, and the delivery of universal healthcare services of the country, each province and each medical facility, to determine priority levels so that social insurance agencies can take the initiative in inspecting and supervising and promptly detecting and preventing the misuse of health insurance benefits.
Within the framework of the Forum, ISSA launched the Regional Social Security Award and honoured outstanding achievements. Accordingly, the National Pension Service of Korea won the Regional Social Security Award and eight other countries were named, including the Vietnam Social Security.
H.T
Vietnamese
