The hospital bidding, as a major task of the current three system reforms of pharmaceutical industry in China, is to separate medicine purchasing and selling from hospital service. To regulate and standardize hospitals' medicine purchasing, the state began to try public bidding in September 1999.
The hospital bidding is to fundamentally change the long-standing situation that hospitals are taken as terminal markets in medicine distribution, making most profits through drug selling instead of clinical treatment and services.
In the latter half of 2000, three or four pilot cities would be selected to detach drugstores from hospitals for setting up independent drug retailing enterprises responsible for their own management decisions, profits and losses.
