POLICE in Wuxi, East China’s Jiangsu Province, have detained 15 suspects at a hospital involved in a healthcare fraud scheme, including the hospital president and its legal representative, the municipal healthcare security administration said yesterday morning.

The privately-owned Wuxi Hongqiao Hospital has been shut down, said the administration.

The municipal administration said that it has launched an investigation into the hospital along with local police and health authorities and its fraudulent scheme has been basically confirmed.

The National Healthcare Security Administration said on Monday that it dispatched an inspection group to the hospital and ordered a comprehensive inspection of all insurance-designated hospitals across the city.

Wuxi Hongqiao Hospital is in the second tier of China’s three-tier hospital system. It has 160 hospital beds and more than 500 staff members.

According to a report on Saturday, a radiologist at the hospital found a number of medical records that contained radiological diagnoses but lacked key information such as imaging test bar codes and radiographic images. Most were written by a doctor in the hospital’s physical examination department who was not involved in any radiological work.

The radiologist took pictures of 99 medical records created from around July 2022 to April 2023 that belonged to patients age 60 to 80.

In March, the radiologist made a report to hospital managers and found more irregularities in the following months. They included identical-looking CT scan images from several patients and two magnetic resonance imaging examinations that were carried out only one minute apart, while one session normally takes at least 10 minutes.

The National Healthcare Security Administration pledged to adopt a zero-tolerance attitude toward medical insurance fraud and said it will punish violators more severely.

Yan Qinghui, its deputy director, told a news conference this month that the administration has stepped up regular and unannounced checks in recent years as part of efforts to crack down on fraud.

It has inspected 432 insurance-designated hospitals in 30 provincial-level regions, and the number of hospitals inspected this year is expected to exceed the total over the past five years.(China Daily)