Việt Nam Social Security’s application of IT has brought about positive impacts. Illustrative Photo

The social security sector has developed the health insurance information assessment system, collaborated with the public health sector to standardise the list of services at more than 12,000 medical facilities, synchronised data on the system, provided training courses for more than 2,000 assessors and hundreds of medical workers to improve the evaluation of health insurance for the better management and effective use of the social insurance fund.

The health insurance information assessment system of Việt Nam Social Security is integrated with useful software including a portal for receiving and exchanging information between medical facilities and social security agencies, which provides search engines and the ability to manage information related to receiving and transferring patients, health insurance card inspection, the notification of assessment results and medical facilities’ health insurance payment.

Between 2018 and 2019, the portal was upgraded with a new function of authorisation to view medical records of health insurance participants which aims to improve information security. Until now, the system has permitted more than 36,000 accounts to access medical records and there have been more than 34,000 views of these documents. The portal also has an add-on allowing users to create certificates for social insurance online.

Besides, the system has assessment software developed based on the procedure of health insurance assessment of Việt Nam Social Security covering more than ten services, performing electronic evaluation over all payment request documents, using over 200 algorithms to detect duplicated records and inappropriate information according to the Ministry of Health’s regulations on medical examination and treatment and health insurance payment.

The monitoring software provides charts on medical treatment and use of health insurance nationwide. These charts help to analyse, evaluate and detect abnormal trends of medical treatment and health insurance payment in each province and medical facility. Epidemiological maps help monitor and assess diseases, including the prevalence and incidence of chronic and acute diseases. This is an important source of information to monitor epidemics and actively prevent the spread of diseases.

The health insurance information assessment system of Việt Nam Social Security is being improved to better serve the demands of medical facilities and patients. In 2018, the system received and assessed some 176.5 million electronic records with more than VND98 trillion (US$4.2 billion) of health insurance payment requested. The national data interconnection rate reached 95.12 per cent with 12,132 medical facilities connected. In the first five months of 2019, the system received and assessed 72.2 million electronic records with VND40.4 trillion of health insurance payment requested.

With the data source of the health insurance information assessment system, from April 2019, Việt Nam Social Security implemented the "Multimedia interaction system between people and businesses through social insurance agencies" using SMS to notify the social insurance coverage for healthcare services and remind household health insurance participants 30 days before the expiration date to ensure their benefits./.