China’s Healthcare Revolution: A Three-Part Series – Healthcare at Home (Part One)

China is a global leader in healthcare innovation. It has been transformative at home, and China is expanding its healthcare influence abroad. In both, China is designing systems that cause admiration and concern to some.

This series looks at all three. Part One focuses on what is happening inside China. Part Two will explore how China is spreading its healthcare reach internationally. Part Three will look at embedded control and oversight features and why the West may find them troubling.

(image from www.sandpipercomms.com)

Healthcare in China

China’s healthcare revolution is a whole-of-nation approach where the central government sets the direction and the rest of the country executes. It is an ongoing process that involves repeated experimentation and adaptivity. Policy. Technology. Citizen acceptance. These are the three forces that define China’s rapid healthcare transformation at home.

Policy

A basic question underlies every healthcare debate. What is healthcare? In China, the Communist Party frames it as a right. Care for everyone. There is history in this view stretching from the Party’s roots as a people’s peasant party, and there is political practicality of working to ensure the Party’s continued power. Both matter.

What sets China apart is how the Party has repositioned the debate. Over tea in Cambridge, Dr. Ruby Wang of LINTRIS shared with me that “China has rebranded health as a driver of economic growth.”

A masterstroke. When healthcare becomes part of the engine of national development, people and companies buy into it. It becomes productive and innovative, as well as socially beneficial.

This stands in contrast to our experience in the West. Dr. Wang notes that innovation itself is not the barrier here. Rather, the barrier is that a stew of privacy debates, regulation, procurement silos, and bureaucracy throw up roadblocks. Healthcare has become a political football. Our incentives are out of whack. The Chinese government avoids this by pushing technology and policy in the same direction across the vast nation in a way that now “touch[es] daily life at scale.”

Technology

The system is built on digital infrastructure. Hospitals have seamless online twins providing care. Citizens use QR codes to schedule appointments, check in, receive results, and follow up. AI is used from triage and diagnostics to prevention and treatment. Robotics, machine learning, and large language models are integrated parts of daily practice. Herculean pharmaceutical management and distribution for 1.3+ billion people are organized and processed through a national labeling and coding system.

Hi-tech Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is also part of the system. In Shanghai, writer Andrew Stokols tested an automated health screen at a community center that used TCM readings. It scanned his tongue, produced a report, and sent it to his phone. A doctor later confirmed much of what the machine detected.

Citizen Acceptance

The third force is citizen acceptance. A system can be brilliant in design, but if people refuse to use it, it will collapse. China does not have this problem. Dr. Wang says receptivity to digital participation is high.

Daily life in China already runs through the cellphone. Access to transportation and buildings, food, banking, shopping. Each requires confirming one’s personal data. Notwithstanding that healthcare is ultimately the most intensely personal aspect of life (and death), adding it to citizens’ digital existence is a natural extension.

The Chinese tradition of cultural communality also plays a role. Whether rooted in family and social ethics, the legacy of collectivism or both, the result is a population comfortable with being online if it delivers a tangible benefit.

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China’s population is diverse. Quality and access to care vary from rural to urban. The expansive, public insurance system has gaps and newer private insurance is uneven. Wealth still buys better care. But the system works. And it is evolving quickly in innovative ways and delivering real improvements in the lives of the people.

For a deeper look at China’s healthcare shift, I recommend Dr. Ruby Wang’s China Health Pulse.