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Strategic Purchasing

 

The 2022 Policy Address announced the plan to establish the Strategic Purchasing Office for co-ordinating the primary healthcare services to be provided to the community through private healthcare sector. To this end, the Strategic Purchasing Office was established under the Health Bureau in November 2022 to oversee the development and implementation of strategic purchasing programmes.

By performing the dual-role, the Strategic Purchasing Office serves as:

1. an executive arm of the Bureau by supporting the Bureau at the policy level in developing and implementing Strategic Purchasing programme; and
2. a common platform to support and manage the Strategic Purchasing programme;

and performs the following functions:

1. To adopt strategic purchasing as a tool to purchase healthcare services from private sector by subsidy and co-payment model under Hong Kong’s existing dual-track healthcare system in order to provide additional healthcare service options to individuals and families so as to achieve the greatest health benefits for the citizens and system efficiency;
2. to define which health services to be bought from whom, how these health services should be paid for, at what rate should be paid, Government’s subsidy, participant’s co-payment and incentive mechanisms;
3. to design the incentive mechanisms in encouraging healthcare service users and providers to use and provide evidence-based healthcare service appropriately, so as to meet the healthcare needs and enhance health benefits;
4. to develop and roll out a common platform to facilitate integrated purchasing of healthcare services, including consolidation of existing HA and DH’s public-private-partnership programmes, and formulate initiatives to meet health policy direction;
5. to integrate the Elderly Health Care Voucher Scheme system into strategic purchasing to maximize resource pooling and utilisation efficiency;
6. to conduct ongoing monitoring and assessment of the strategic purchasing programmes with a view to ensuring achievement of programme objectives and efficient use of resources; and
7. to set up a community drug formulary to contain drug cost and enhance drug access to strategic purchasing programme by combining the purchasing power with HA.