Research Hotspots in China's Medical Service Price Reform: An Empirical Analysis in Western China

Background: The price of medical services is essentially the charging standard for medical services provided by medical institutions to patients, which concerns the most direct and realistic interests of the people. The reform of medical service prices is a key link in the reform of China's “Three Medical Reforms” (medical treatment, medicine, medical insurance), and it also contributes to the high-quality development of public hospitals and health care. This paper focuses on medical service price reform and the dynamic adjustment of medical service prices to empirically analyse the reform of medical service prices in a province in western China and provide support for subsequent development. Methods: Excel was used to count the changing trend in the volume of medical service research literature in China, and CiteSpace 6.1. R1 was used to visually analyse the keywords and emergent words. Bicomb software was used to count the keywords to form the word matrix of this article. SPSS 25.0 statistical software was used for multidimensional scale analysis, which comprehensively reflected the core degree and maturity of the research subject. The grey relational method is used to analyse the degree of correlation between various incomes and medical income, and the degree of structural change is used to analyse the degree of influence of the adjustment of income structure on the change in medical income. Results: In the past 20 years, the number of publications on the medical services price reform in China has increased overall, with medical service prices (200 times), public hospitals (103 times), and medical services (49 times) as the three most frequent keywords. The reform has gone through three stages: the implementation stage, the straightening stage, and the deepening stage, focusing on medical service pricing, standardized management of medical service items, and dynamic adjustment of medical service prices. The empirical analysis results show that among the pilot hospitals, the second-level hospitals have the largest structural change (17.57%), followed by the third-class hospitals. The medical service income of hospitals at different levels basically shows a positive change, which is the largest, with a change of 7.94%, 12.69%, 24.71%. Drug consumption income and inspection income basically showed negative changes, with comprehensive changes of -9.49% and -18.36%, respectively. Conclusions: The research results show that China's medical service price reform has achieved phased results, and the Ningxia Province policy pilot has achieved great results. With the deepening of the reform, the medical services price structure has been improved, the medical value of medical staff has been enhanced, the initiative of hospitals and medical staff has been mobilized, and the cost burden of patients' medical treatment has been alleviated to a certain extent. In future reforms, the establishment of a dynamic adjustment mechanism for medical service prices should be sped up; equal attention focused on the standardized management of medical service items and price monitoring and assessment; an improved comprehensive, scientific, orderly and efficient mechanism established; and the three medical services should cooperate to further optimize the structure of medical income and rationalize the price comparison relationship to better guarantee that the people receive medical treatment for their illnesses.