China's Great Leap Forward in digital medicine

 30-Mar-15, Bloomberg View

You might have thought that the rise of digital technology would have transformed health care by now. Not quite. In the U.S., electronic medical records for example are still seen by many doctors as a bust. Different record-keeping systems are incompatible with one another. Digital records fail to surface important information.

Image: Bloomberg View

There is however, another giant economy where the balance of existing health care infrastructure and future potential looks very different. As a result, it may be there, in China, that many of the digital innovations that eventually transform health care everywhere will first take hold.

One big change that is supposed to come soon is online prescription-drug sales. Alibaba’s Tmall shopping site is likely to be one of the big sellers of prescriptions. 

Tencent has its own doctor’s appointment system using mobile chat service WeChat and payments service WePay. Beijing’s municipal government is using Baidu’s “health cloud” service for illness prevention and “pre-diagnosis assessments.”

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