Chinese Healthcare System On the Road to Reform – Double the Doctors

Refreshing news reached the public when the main Chinese administrative authority announced a very ambitious plan: doubling the number of doctors by 2020. And that is not all of it.

China has become more aware of the need to trim its public sector and boost technology use in hospitals if it wants to revive a very deficient healthcare system. As if this task was not enough, the system is aiming at decreasing queues and improving rural service.

McKinsey & Co have reported an increasing global interest in China’s fast-growing healthcare market – medical device firms, drug makers and hospital operators – they all want a piece of the healthcare bill. Their interest isn’t completely misplaced as the profits are expected to reach $1 trillion by 2020.

Monday night, China’s State Council gave a statement touching all the things that are currently going wrong in the Chinese healthcare system: insufficient resources, poor quality of services, bad organization of facilities, and sever fragmentation of service systems.

Next in his speech, he presented a five-year roadmap pinpointing all the targets that need improving between 2015 and 2020. By the end of the project, Beijing hopes that two doctors will cover a thousand people – which translates in almost double the doctors reported in 2013.

Besides general doctors, the government intends a significant increase in support staff and nursing. The most common cause of the lack of doctors in China is the absurdly low salaries, resulting in an ever-growing tension between underpaid medical practitioners and their frustrated patients.

Involving technology more and more in the system is another target, and China plans including mobile devices and online “cloud systems” as a part of the solution. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd with its healthcare subordinate Alibaba Health Information Technology Ltd stands to gain a great profit from the up-coming changes.

Health records are also set to move to digital databases, centralizing patient information for most of the (if not the entire) population by 2020.

President Xi Jinping’s government is using different strategies to provide access to affordable healthcare as a key platform. One issue that needs change the most and the fastest is eradicating corruption in the sector, as patients complain about large out-of-pocket expenses because insurance doesn’t cover as much of the medical procedures as it should.

Due to increasing interest shown by national and international firms, the Chinese roadmap recommended more access to those who want to take up the role of running hospitals. Public health institutions cannot continue accounting for around 90 percent of the total number of hospital beds, so it is opening to the private sector.

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