Background

Abstract

The Ministry of Health and five other ministries jointly issued a document titled “guidelines for public hospital reform” in February 2010 and established 22 pilot reform cities throughout China. The document required all local reforms to adhere to public welfare goals, attempt to resolve the problems with the administrative system and compensation mechanisms, and promote four types of separation (i.e., separation of government functions from those of institutions, separation of management from operations, separation of prescriptions from dispensing of drugs, and separation of the for-profit and nonprofit nature of hospitals), thereby signifying a determination for China to enact reform of public hospitals (Zhao and Feng 2010). The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (CPLA) actively responded to this national call, and drawing on the resources of military hospitals (e.g., their high quality human resources and research conditions), proposed the concept of a “research-oriented hospital.” Then, the CPLA led a pilot construction of research-oriented hospitals. The proposed research-oriented hospital represented the high requirements for public hospitals reform—namely, that public hospitals should not only drive the development of medical technology to benefit humanity but also return to a path of public welfare, continually limiting costs while maximizing the public benefit. The research-oriented hospital immediately garnered the attention of the State Ministry of Health (Guo-Quan 2010). The Chinese Research-oriented Hospital Association was formally established in 2013. It was launched by the Vice Minister of the General Logistics Department of the CPLA, Qin Yinhe, in 2012, with support from the Ministry of Health and the Health Department of the General Logistics Department; it was built over one year. Since then, construction of research-oriented hospitals has been in full swing across the country, pushing public hospital reform to new heights. The Army Institute for Health Management seized this opportunity, drawing on ten years of macro-level health policy research, to focus on public hospital reform and research-oriented hospital construction (Liu 2004). With the support of the National Natural Science Foundation and the Health Department of the General Logistics Department, the Army Institute for Health Management undertook a key project original proposed by the National Natural Science Foundation, entitled “Research on Public Hospital Reform via Evidence-Based Decision-Making According to Multiple Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) Modeling of Public Welfare” (71233008), along with a theory monograph entitled “Research-oriented Hospital Transformation Mechanisms and Management.”