Earlier this year, in an attempt to address challenges presented by demographic change, China’s State Council circulated a plan for deepening reform of the country’s health-care system. The plan, which aims to guide medical reforms in specific regions, was widely seen as encouraging the further development of digital health programmes to increase local access to services by introducing remote medical consultations.
Emerging technologies lead
As the government gets involved in certifying organisations that deliver digital health care, its initiatives will create a halo effect that boosts the fortunes not only of doctors, hospitals and clinics, but also of firms providing associated technical services. Digital health-care platforms like Good Doctor, from Ping An Insurance, and We Doctor, whose backers include Tencent and Goldman Sachs, are creating online connections that will bring patients and doctors closer together. The significant capital these initiatives can access allows them to tackle many opportunities and challenges at once. Where they succeed, the changes they bring to health care will occur on a massive scale.
Good Doctor, for example, has been able to recruit over 1,000 full-time doctors to take online consultations, and has registered partnerships with a further 50,000 practitioners from public and private hospitals. These numbers have game-changing potential, allowing the service to create new offerings, test them rigorously on large audiences and make sure they bring clients back for repeated use. Such extensive testing and refinement will eventually make virtual health care a reality for the masses, achieving economies of scale that make it profitable and therefore sustainable.
The AI way
The health-care revolution won’t stop at changing the way doctors and patients interact. As artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to the vast quantities of data that digital health care makes available, it will catalyse a wave of innovation, improving and redefining health-care provision and delivery in unforeseen ways. AI-enabled drug research and personalised medicine will change how and when patients receive therapies, going so far as to ensure patients’ psychological states are taken into account when devising drug regimens. It will be possible to always deliver the right dose of the right medication, even for short, episodic treatments. Care for chronic diseases will become more personal, too.
New eastern ways
China is also leading the world in trialling new therapies that could considerably alter the health-care landscape. For example, it is vying with the United States to be the first to treat human subjects with lung cancer using the CRISPR gene-editing technique. The controversial technology will be only used on non-germline cells so that the mutations introduced — and their potentially unforeseen consequences — are not passed on to future generations. China is also a leading player in many other areas of work in DNA and genomics.
The pace of change in China’s digital health space is clearly accelerating in response to the massive domestic needs of an ageing population and an increasingly affluent middle class. This is more than just a Chinese phenomenon, though: the discoveries made in addressing these needs will find their ways into homes and doctors’ surgeries far beyond China’s borders. As the halo around the country’s efforts in digital health care spreads, and the resulting innovations transform individual lives, China will be at the forefront of a global revolution.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
