Involving 5 categories of products and 25 provinces, China's inter-provincial procurement of IVD reagents started

Anhui Healthcare Security Administration in November issued a notice that a procurement involving 5 product categories and covering 25 provinces starts. The procurement will last 2 years.

Five main product categories are involved

According to the announcement, the procurement involves five categories, namely human papilloma virus (HPV-DNA) PCR-based typing test, human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) (chemiluminescence), six sex hormones (chemiluminescence), eight infectious diseases (enzyme immunoassay and chemiluminescence), and two glucose metabolisms (chemiluminescence).

The procurement will last two years and can be extended appropriately after expiring. The notice proposes that all public medical institutions in the alliance area should participate in the inter-provincial volume-based procurement of IVD reagents. 

The notice also made it clear that, the declaring companies must not be punished by the provincial and above medical products departments for their declared product quality and other problems since 2022. 

The declaring companies are responsible for the quality of the declared products. Once selected, the company should organize the production in a timely manner and in sufficient quantity according to the requirements and promise that all specifications of the selected products will meet the procurement requirements of the medical institutions.

In August 2021, Anhui Province started the centralized procurement for routine chemiluminescence items with larger clinical usage and more competing manufacturers, the scope of which involves reagent items such as tumor markers, thyroid, and infectious diseases. 

In January 2023, they completed the volume-based procurement of coagulation class, infarction class clinical testing reagents.