The 14th Five-Year medical equipment industry development plan, issued jointly by MIIT, the National Health Commission and the National Development and Reform Commission, makes accelerating intelligent medical equipment a priority. What are the focus points for smart healthcare?
Medical equipment underpins smart healthcare. MIIT data show the industry grew fast through the last five-year period, reaching RMB 840 billion in market size in 2020, and market players stay active: business registration data show 748,000 new medical equipment-related enterprises in 2021 alone.
‘We are actively cultivating leading enterprises, specialised ‘little giant’ firms and single champions,’ said Wang Weiming, director of MIIT’s equipment industry department. Distinctive industrial clusters have formed in the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas, making China one of the world’s major medical equipment manufacturing bases.
What the plan targets
Deep integration of information technology with manufacturing and faster adoption of IT in medical equipment – reshaping medical service models – is a defining direction, as new equipment serving whole populations across full life cycles becomes a global hotspot, per National Health Commission official Qi Guixin.
The plan supports deep cross-industry cooperation among equipment makers, medical institutions, electronics firms and internet companies, encouraging devices to integrate 5G medical modules and embed AI, industrial internet and cloud computing.
‘We will encourage enterprises to focus on smart hospital construction needs and accelerate development of guidance, screening, assisted testing and contactless intelligent scanning medical robots, developing original intelligent medical equipment,’ Qi said. The five-year period will use 5G to upgrade healthcare network infrastructure, build new digital infrastructure and medical platforms, and advance 5G-plus-health models to support tiered diagnosis and treatment.
Emergency medical rescue capability also stands to gain: the industry will push production toward flexible, intelligent, fine-grained methods and raise the intelligence level of emergency equipment.
Elder care gets its own provisions: extending medical equipment service chains with automatic sensing, storage and transmission, intelligent computing and assessment-warning for key populations; and speeding development of new nursing and rehabilitation equipment based on robotics, intelligent vision and voice interaction – intelligent rehabilitation robots and mobility assistance for daily life.
The next step is home- and community-level equipment: embedding health sensing devices in homes and public spaces where key populations live, exploring a new integrated service model covering prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, nursing and daily care, Wang said.
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