Health-care plan to boost IT spending
China's pledge to enact sweeping reforms in its health-care sector appears poised to drive massive spending on health information technology nationwide, according to experts.
International Business Machines Corp, the world's largest computer-services company, estimated the opportunity to enhance the capabilities of 1,000 large mainland hospitals with a combination of key technology hardware, software and services would need total investments worth about US$1.5 billion.
'That is a conservative estimate,' said Matt Wang Yang, vice-president of IBM's China Development Lab, which is responsible for developing the United States-based company's health-care technology solutions portfolio targeting the mainland.
Out of the 4 trillion yuan (HK$4.54 trillion) economic stimulus programme announced by the central government in November, 850 billion yuan was committed to kick-start initiatives that would make health-care services safer, more efficient, convenient and affordable to its 1.3 billion citizens by 2011.
Authorities on Monday unveiled a blueprint for a basic universal health-care programme that is expected to be fully established, in both rural and urban areas, by 2020. It is endorsed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the State Council. 'We are working with the government to find out the portion of investment that goes to meeting the information technology requirements of this health-care reform,' Mr Wang said.
In the United States, US$19 billion has been earmarked by its government to put in place essential information technology infrastructure that will help upgrade that country's health-care services.
Mr Wang said China will eclipse that amount on the scale of its US$124 billion funding to achieve universal medical coverage over the next several years.
According to Springboard Research, the total market for health-care-related technology spending in the Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, will reach US$4.83 billion next year.
'China is the 800-pound gorilla of technology in the Asian health-care industry,' said Jonathan Silber, senior market analyst at Springboard. He said the mainland comprised 46 per cent of all health-care technology spending in the region, followed by Australia with a 25 per cent share.
IBM's own estimates for health-care-related technology spending were partly based on its work with the Guangdong Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. It is the largest hospital in southern China, receiving about 4 million patient visits a year.
IBM last month secured a deal to implement a Clinical and Health Records Analytics and Sharing project for the hospital.
The landmark project will introduce a new suite of IBM health-care information-sharing and analytics technologies that will enable the hospital to share and analyse electronic medical records that incorporate traditional Chinese medicine and modern western medicine across its network, which includes four branch facilities.
IBM's analytics and sharing system is touted as an open standard for health-care practitioners to more deeply understand which treatment plans and techniques from each approach work best for specific diseases and medical conditions.
