Objective  To examine the policy support to and the effect of health poverty alleviation program for providing recommendations to promote the implementation of the program.

  Methods  We collected the data on disease-related poverty population and the implementation of health poverty alleviation program in Shandong province during 2015 – 2017 and performed statistics to analyze the performance of and existing problems in the program implementation.

  Results  By the end of 2017 in the province, totally 353 thousands disease-related poverty people have been lifted out of poverty and the majority of population still in disease-related poverty were in western regions. The diseases conditions were generally improved or stable but the cure rate of the diseases was low among the patients covered by the program and the reimbursement rate of medication expenses was relatively high for the disease-related poverty population.

  Conclusion  Health poverty alleviation program achieved obvious effect in Shandong province but there were still a number of patients in poverty-returning due to medication expenses in some regions, indicating that medication effect needs to be improved in the disease-related poverty population.