World-renowned leader in health care philosophy, Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, advocated expanding health care in communities and adopting telemedicine approaches as China works to reform its publicly-funded hospital system.

Kizer made the remarks at the High-level Forum on the Reform of China's Public Hospitals, which was held Friday in Beijing and was organized by the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Kizer formerly served as under-secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and was the chief executive officer of the nation's largest health care system.

While at the VA, Kizer engineered the most successful reform of the VA's health care delivery system. The internationally-acclaimed transformation of the VA health care system is often cited as a model for health care reform.

"If more care is provided in the community or at home, and more care is provided by telemedicine, patients' waiting times go down and distances go down, besides, community hospitals are more sensitive to patients' particular needs," he said. "I think those lessons are very replicable to China."

As the man responsible for the deployment of electronic health records during the VA reform, Kizer explained how telemedicine works. "The nurses are at home with patients, say who have a rash, and they send a picture to the doctor via the Internet who may be hundreds of miles away, and doctors could tell them what to do."

Telemedicine has to be applied in tandem with electronic health records, which Kizer said enables doctors to access all information about a patient, including what drugs they are on, what their conditions are, and what their allergies are. "It's immediately available, making it much easier to provide good care, and also reduces unnecessary duplicates of laboratory tests."

On Friday, presidents of large public hospitals nationwide, scholars and health care decision makers gathered at the forum to discuss China's ongoing public hospital reforms.

China kicked off its health care reforms in April 2009, aiming to correct long-standing problems in its health care system and ease public grievances. It has put reforming public hospitals and the essential medicine system as its two main pillars.

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