In March 2025, the National Healthcare Security Administration issued the Guideline on Establishing Medical Service Price Items for the Nervous System (Trial), setting up separate price items for invasive and non-invasive brain-computer interface technologies. The title is long, but in a hospital it settles one small thing: which column this technology should be billed under.
Before that, brain-computer interfaces lived mostly in laboratories and clinical research. However advanced a device is, if the billing catalog has no matching item, a hospital cannot issue a compliant bill or fit it into routine care. For a patient, whether the technology exists is one question; whether it can be properly charged for is another.
So the point of this guideline is not to hand money to anyone, but to fix the naming first. With item names in place, provinces know which box to set a standard for; only then can hospitals charge by that standard and patients pay by it. The order looks dull, but it is a step a technology cannot skip on its way to the bedside.
No Billing Window in the Lab
Winding the clock back makes this clearer. According to CNR, the guideline was issued in March 2025 and described in detail the service output, price composition and billing notes for the three items. By the usual pace, a medical device often took a year or two between approval and being billable in a hospital.
China News Service later added a more vivid line: the administration set up the price items while brain-computer interface products were still at the laboratory stage. The right to charge was established before the products spread; what was being waited for was not a device, but a price list that could be entered into the system.
Two things need to be kept apart here. The guideline is a national framework of items: it only says which items exist, what each service produces and how it is counted. As for the actual price, the guideline states that regions with pricing authority set it by moving up or down from a province-wide benchmark. A framework and a price tag are not the same sheet of paper.
Three Lines Written Into the Guideline
The three items set apart all have long names: the invasive brain-computer interface implantation fee, the invasive brain-computer interface removal fee, and the non-invasive brain-computer interface adaptation fee. According to CNR, the implantation fee covers surgical planning, electrode placement, parameter adjustment, signal testing and verification, fixation and suturing.
The removal fee adds electrode extraction, signal-interface disconnection and wound repair on top of implantation; the adaptation fee covers electrode placement and adjustment, signal acquisition and real-time monitoring, algorithm tuning, data analysis and system optimization. Three lines break one technology into separately billable actions, giving hospitals somewhere to write the charge down.
One Province Filled in the Numbers
Not long after the framework was set, Hubei quickly filled in the numbers. According to the Hubei Provincial Healthcare Security Administration website and CCTV News, on March 31, 2025, Hubei put the three price items into effect and set government-guided prices: 6,552 yuan per invasive implantation, 3,139 yuan per removal, and 966 yuan per non-invasive adaptation.
These three figures are prices for Hubei province alone, and as the report notes, they are province-wide ceilings: they cannot be raised, though they may be lowered. The National Healthcare Security Administration website later said the same in another report, listing 6,552, 3,139 and 966 yuan as the standards Hubei set. To call them a uniform national price is to paste one province's tag onto the whole country.
What actually spans many provinces is a different range. According to China News Service and Guangming Net, most provinces have now set government-guided prices, with invasive implantation clustering between 6,000 and 6,600 yuan per session and non-invasive adaptation around 960 yuan. The range does not conflict with 6,552 yuan: one gathers many places, the other is a single province among them.
Jiangxi offers a clearer footnote. According to a report reposted on the Jiangxi Provincial Healthcare Security Administration website, the province set up 5 brain-computer interface medical service price items, effective November 1, 2025, making it the 6th province to put them into practice; its prices, 6,500 yuan per implantation, 3,100 yuan per removal and 960 yuan per adaptation, are not the same as Hubei's.
A Price Item Is Not Reimbursement
This is the easiest point to slide past: having a price item only means a hospital can charge in compliance; it does not mean insurance pays for the patient. The report on the Jiangxi administration website is blunt, saying these items are "paid by patients out of pocket and not yet included in medical insurance payment". The price tag is up, but the patient is still the one paying.
Payment was a separate link added later. According to reports by Jingchu Net and Changjiang Yun News, in May 2026 the Hubei administration further specified the payment categories of 82 nervous-system medical service items and placed the 3 core surgical items above into medical insurance Class B. Between being able to charge and being able to reimburse lay another document.
Progress elsewhere is uneven too. According to China News Service, most provinces have government-guided prices, Beijing has placed the invasive implantation fee in medical insurance Class A, and Neuracle's NEO was added to Shanghai's medical insurance consumables catalog 10 days after going on the market. All are called implementation, yet each has reached a different step.
It is also worth noting that the word "included" lands in different places. The Beijing item refers to an implantation fee entering medical insurance Class A; the Shanghai one refers to a product entering a medical consumables catalog. One governs a service charge, the other a consumable, they are not the same ledger. When readers see "covered by insurance", it is worth asking which box was entered.
An Operation That Finally Matched a Price
After prices stood up, what came first was an operation paid for out of research funds. Winding back to November 26, 2025, according to the National Healthcare Security Administration website, a hospital in Wuhan completed an invasive brain-computer interface implant for a patient with a spinal cord injury, a clinical procedure carried out against the government-set price items.
What is interesting is how that operation was paid for. The same report states that brain-computer interface technology was still in clinical research at the time, not yet in market use, and the cost was borne by research funds. In other words, the price list was hanging on the wall, but reaching the point of patients paying or insurance settling the bill still lay further down the road.
Price items first, patients afterward, that is exactly the order being described. According to China News Service, Jiang Changsong, an expert at the National Institute of Healthcare Security at Capital Medical University, noted that once a price appears, companies can calculate a payback period and hospitals have a basis for charging; with a price, the whole chain begins to turn.
For an ordinary family, this thread is more worth remembering than any specific price. On seeing a story saying brain-computer interfaces can be reimbursed, it helps to ask three questions: is there a matching local price item, has that item entered the payment catalog, and under which category. Only after those three does a price list truly concern you.
A guideline with a very long name, a few numbers one province filled in first, and an operation paid for by research funds all line up into one point: before a technology reaches the bedside, it must first have a place in the billing system. That price list does not treat anyone, yet it often decides, earlier than the device does, when patients can begin to arrive.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information and is for reference only. It does not constitute investment advice.