Dongtai City is leveraging digital empowerment to bridge the gap in medical services between urban and rural areas, creating a physical operation of the medical community management platform, and implementing measures such as medical insurance package payment. Efforts are being made to address issues such as weak grassroots capabilities, patient outflow, and losses in medical insurance funds, and to develop a new model for the construction of county-level medical communities.
The medical insurance for employees and residents in Dongtai City, Jiangsu Province, has suffered consecutive losses for many years, with a settlement difference of up to 510 million yuan over the years. The proportion of medical insurance pooling funds used for remote medical treatment payments was once nearly 35%, and coupled with an aging rate of nearly 40%, medical insurance is facing a crisis of "bottoming out".
In recent years, Dongtai City has leveraged digital empowerment to bridge the gap in medical services between urban and rural areas, established a physical operation of the medical community management platform, and implemented measures such as medical insurance package payment to create a new model for the construction of county-level medical communities. In 2025, the expenditure of the medical insurance pooling fund will decrease by 5.18%, the expenditure on medical treatment in other places will decrease by 1.58%, and the county-level medical treatment rate will reach 90%.
The practice of Dongtai Medical Community in solving problems such as weak grassroots capabilities, patients running away, and medical insurance fund losses has been recognized by the industry. It has been jointly recommended by five national ministries as a typical case of rural public services in 2024, and has been selected as a typical case in China for the 78th and 79th World Health Assembly's "Artificial Intelligence Empowering Primary Health Care" and "Building a More Fair and Accessible Medical and Health Service System in the Digital Age" side events in 2025 and 2026.
