Page 122 - 2022 Taiwan Health and Welfare Report

(3) Improvement Program for Medically Underserved Areas : With the spirit of "local services", doctors of Chinese medicine, Western medicine and dentists are encouraged to practice or provide mobile healthcare in these areas. In 2021, a total of 603 contracted medical institutions provided medical resources in underserved areas, serving more than 653,000 people.
(4) According to National Health Insurance Act and Article 60 of the Enforcement Rules of the National Health Insurance Act, residents in underserved regions are entitled to a 20% copayment discount for the outpatient, emergency and home care services.
(5) The NHIA established the "Platform for Nationwide Demand for Physicians in Rural Areas" on February 25, 2021 to recruit and encourage physicians to provide services in areas with relatively insufficient medical resources, granting access to appropriate medical resources to all those insured by the NHI.
3. Caring for Patients with Catastrophic Diseases and Rare Diseases
(1) The insured acquiring a major illness and injury certificate can be exempted from the copayment. By the end of 2021, over 990,000 major illness/injury certificates were issued (the number of patients was over 930,000, accounting for 3.9% of the total insured), while the expenses for major injury/disease in 2021 stood at about NTD 236.9 billion (accounting for 29.7% of total annual medical expenditure).
(2) People with rare MOHW-certified diseases that appear on NHI's catastrophic diseases list, could not only be exempted from copayment, but also be fully covered for the use of medicines designated by the MOHW as necessary treatment for these rare diseases. As of the end of 2021, 12,241 catastrophic diseases certificate were approved.
▏Section 7 Apply Technology to Improve Efficiency
The NHIA's "NHI MediCloud System" includes Western and Chinese medicine prescription use records, examination and test records and results, detailed records of surgeries, dental treatment and surgical record had been added by the end of 2021. Query services were used by 28,528 medical institutions in 2021, with an average of 37 million queries per month. Around 86.3% of all those seeking treatment used the query service. The patients who have been queried of their drug records, their ratio of overlapping medication days across medical institution of antihypertensive, antihyperlipidemic, hypoglycemic, sedative-hypnotic, antipsychotic, and antidepressant has decreased year by year, indicating that the Medicloud system has effectively avoided duplicated medication. It is estimated that about NTD 10.97 billion were reduced on duplicated drug fees for all drugs between 2014 to 2021. The fees for a total of 44 duplicated tests such as CT, MRI, blood tests was reduced by 1.64 billion payment points during 2018 to 2021.
To enhance public control over their own health and medical treatment, people can now register with the "My Health Bank" system to inquire or download their personal medical information including outpatient, inpatient, medication, surgery, allergies, test (examination) results, imagery or pathology tests, discharge summaries, organ donation/palliative care consent/advanced decision, adult preventive health exam results, screening results for 4 types of cancer and vaccination records. The "NHI Express" APP for logging into My Health Bank over a verified mobile phone was added in 2018, and recording of information from self-paid health exams, dependent management and major illness/injury reminder features were added in 2019. To help keep COVID-19 under control, My Health Bank added the mask purchase record in 2020. In 2021, a new function was established integrating COVID-19 vaccination, PCR test, rapid test results data and adding medical radiology record, giving people a convenient single window for enquiry. As of the end of 2021, 7.4 million people have accessed My Health Bank system 162 million times; in future,
120