The National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) is actively promoting the virtual health insurance card, and 300,000 people have already applied for it. NHIA director-general Po-Chang Lee said that the virtual health insurance card will be implemented in these three major areas this year, and at the same time, the integration of electronic prescription device and mobile payment, and the study of the linkage of street payment, Line Pay, etc., to improve the medical mobile money flow.

The virtual health insurance card system will be developed first and piloted in different levels of hospitals in the next year. The home healthcare system is designed to alleviate the inconvenience of carrying various equipment, the telemedicine system is designed to allow doctors on the ground and at remote locations to provide consultation services by scanning the patient's virtual health insurance card, and the video clinic is designed to allow doctors to see patients remotely during the new epidemic.

The virtual health card is an important tool for digital health care and an important national policy. The primary goal is to increase the number of people using the virtual health card, such as the requirement that colleagues at the hospital should have a virtual health card, and the inclusion of shrimp skin shopping as part of the virtual health card for purchaser identification.

According to Lee, there are currently 147 medical institutions and home care agencies that provide virtual health insurance card services. A questionnaire survey of users found that nearly 90% of the public are satisfied with the application of the virtual health insurance card, and expect the virtual health insurance card to be combined with prescription request memos, so that they can use the virtual health insurance card to collect medication from pharmacies and integrate vaccine passport information.

When people present their virtual health insurance card on the Health Insurance Express App for a video consultation, the doctor will be able to upload the prescription information directly to them after opening the prescription," said Lee. The user will then be redirected to the mobile payment app page where they can pay for the video consultation directly.

Once payment has been made, people can go to the pharmacy and present their physical health insurance card and the e-prescription from the Health Insurance Express App to collect their medication. At this point, the pharmacist logs into the Health Insurance Cloud Query System to check the contents and validity of the prescription, and then clicks on the screen to confirm the prescription after it has been dispensed.

As for the e-payment section, when people have completed their visit, the Health Insurance Express App will automatically display the payment screen. At this point, if the medical institution offers mobile payment options, such as Medical Pay, or the future Health Insurance Department's plan to connect to Street Pay, Line Pay and Appay, people will be able to pay by clicking on one of them.

Lee stressed that NHIA has started training in the second half of this year to train seeds of staff from institutions and community centres to teach people in rural areas to apply for and use the virtual health insurance card.