Hong Kong's The South China Morning Post announced the launch of China Digital Health Report 2021, the most comprehensive and up-to-date report on the topic, examines how China and other leading nations are adopting technology solutions to address the growing pressure on national healthcare systems and imbalances in health resources. 

The report covers government policy initiatives in China and presents key challenges and opportunities in each of the four sectors of digital health with data collected from over 200 Chinese digital health companies. Sectors include internet healthcare, AI in healthcare, healthcare IT, and big data in healthcare. The report analyses initiatives behind China’s rapid growth in its digital health industry and provides key trends, challenges, and opportunities for the sector’s future. Developed by SCMP Research, the report also features four in-depth case studies on how the industry has addressed key challenges and opportunities and compares China’s progress in digital health with five leading countries, including China, Australia, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and United States. SCMP found the global healthcare workforce shortage is expected to grow from 6 million in 2015 to 15.5 million workers by 2030, and Covid 19 has only reinforced the trend. 

Key findings of the China Digital Health Report include:

• Internet healthcare is the largest of the four sectors of digital health, and is expected to see the highest growth.
• The most common use case of 54 million internet healthcare users is remote consultation, but many players are driving revenue through sales of drugs and wellness products.
• AI in healthcare is significantly reducing the time and cost of drug development, a process that typically costs over US$1bn and 10 years.
• The government has set explicit goals for hospitals to upgrade their healthcare IT systems, specifically to improve the maturity levels of their electronic medical record (EMR) systems.
• In big data in healthcare, the Chinese government, through state-owned enterprises and state investment companies, has developed major initiatives to develop nationwide infrastructures.

The report is targeted at investors, executives, technologists and academics interested in understanding the complexity of China's digital health market. Information about five complementary exclusive webinars featuring digital health experts and executives from the China digital health industry is also available in the report.