Over the decade of Healthy China, the country's healthcare system has shifted from ensuring people can "access and afford" medical care to helping them "receive quality care." In the past, high-quality medical resources were concentrated in big cities. Today, powered by technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, big data and domestically produced medical equipment, people can have scans done in the cloud, consult doctors online and undergo remote surgery, breaking down geographical barriers and bringing high-level diagnosis and treatment services to ordinary households.
In Shijiang Village, Xianjie Subdistrict, Anning City, Kunming, Yunnan Province - about a half-hour drive from downtown Anning - 55-year-old villager Lao Li has had hypertension for five years, and his blood pressure remained poorly controlled despite medication. One morning, feeling dizzy and weak, he went straight to the village clinic without a second thought. After a brief inquiry, village doctor Ma Xiaolin immediately ran an electrocardiogram for him. With a swipe of his ID card, the freshly generated ECG was synchronized to the computer of a specialist at a top-tier hospital dozens of kilometers away.
"Beyond full coverage of the ECG network center, we have also achieved county-township-village full coverage of prescription review, drug delivery and regional laboratory testing. This year we will extend AI and remote consultation to full county-township-village coverage, so that people can enjoy standardized medical services right at their doorstep."
From "Clinical Pain Points" to "Made in China with Chinese Intelligence"
For a long time, the disconnect between research and clinical practice, and the difficulty of translating R&D results into real applications, has been a "bottleneck" problem in medical technology. After top-tier hospitals were relocated to suburban new towns, could the abundant supply of clinical cases help fill the research gap? How can frontline clinical challenges be turned into homegrown innovations? Our reporter launched an investigation.
In integrated industry-city development zones such as Changping and Yizhuang in Beijing, hospitals and industrial parks are almost adjoining. Many patients visiting for treatment do not realize that a single examination they undergo may be helping push a new type of device toward the market.
Yang Qi, a young and middle-aged expert honored by the National Health Commission and vice president of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital:
"We used to face clinical dilemmas, especially with critical patients in the ICU who are hooked up to various ventilators, blood-filtering machines and life-saving equipment, none of which allow conventional MRI scans. We know conventional MRI requires a large room, fixed equipment and a shielded chamber. If a critically ill patient cannot be examined in time, the disease is often delayed, posing a risk of death."
For a long time, bedside imaging for critical patients has been difficult. Focusing on this problem, universities, hospitals and enterprises - leveraging abundant critical-care case resources - formed medicine-engineering cross-disciplinary teams to tackle multiple "bottleneck" technologies. The R&D team broke through core difficulties one by one, including equipment self-shielding, whole-machine miniaturization, mobile adaptation and AI image denoising. By optimizing magnetic field strength and streamlining equipment structure, they achieved lightweight, movable devices while ensuring core diagnostic accuracy, truly bringing MRI equipment into wards for real-time bedside detection.
Yang Qi:
"Starting in 2019, through medicine-engineering collaboration, we finally settled the MRI field strength at around 0.2T, lightening the weight so it can move. We started from problems raised by the hospital, with our hospital researchers breaking through key technologies, while enterprises helped us realize these technologies, and through clinical validation we returned to the clinic - a complete closed loop."
Top-tier hospitals relocated to new towns are becoming regional innovation hubs. Jishuitan Hospital has taken root in Changping Life Valley, leveraging massive orthopedic case volumes to drive the continuous iteration of orthopedic robots and 3D-printed medical devices. Fuwai Hospital has settled in Mentougou's "Heart Valley," relying on abundant cardiovascular case resources to jointly develop minimally invasive interventional devices and cardiac rehabilitation smart equipment with park enterprises, building a cardiovascular medicine-engineering translation platform. After relocation, these top-tier hospitals are both medical front lines serving the public and innovation platforms driving the upgrading of regional biomedicine industries.
From "Doorstep" Telemedicine to Frontier-Tech-Led Innovation
Telemedicine and other means bring the benefits of medical technology to all. But what is the national picture? Let's look at two sets of data.
First, the situation in bridging the "last mile" of technology:
To date, the telemedicine network covers all prefecture-level cities and counties nationwide;
3,099 tightly integrated county-level medical consortiums have been built nationwide, covering 924 million permanent residents;
80% of counties, cities and districts have built county-level imaging, ECG and laboratory sharing centers;
Annual remote imaging diagnosis services at the county level exceed 68 million person-times nationwide;
County-level sharing centers for imaging, ECG, laboratory and pharmacy provided nearly 190 million services to grassroots facilities over the year, implementing the "grassroots examination, upper-level diagnosis" model;
75.9% of public hospitals above the secondary level can retrieve examination reports across institutions, so grassroots patients need not repeat scans or tests when seeking care at other hospitals, saving 150-300 yuan per person in examination fees and 1-3 hours of waiting.
Now let's look at domestic innovation:
The latest statistics show that in the first half of this year, China approved 38 "globally new" innovative drugs and 42 innovative medical devices, including "world's first" medical device products such as the world's first implantable brain-computer interface medical device.
As of June 30, China had recorded 81 outbound licensing deals for innovative drugs, with a total transaction value of about $110 billion, spanning 10 therapeutic areas including oncology, metabolism, immunity and neurology, mainly licensed to 20 countries and regions including the United States, Britain, France and Italy.
The number of new drugs under development in China accounts for about 30% of the global total, ranking second in the world.
A decade of Healthy China - from doorstep telemedicine to frontier medical technology leading innovation - has changed not only healthcare data, but also the confidence of hundreds of millions of ordinary people in seeking medical care.
