The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 50

China: A Market for mHealth?

China: A Market for mHealth?
The China-British Business Council recently published this article, looking into the opportunities for
mHealth in China. The Chinese healthcare market represents huge potential opportunities for digital
health and mhealth service providers, but there are still significant barriers to widespread adoption.
Following the theme of this issue the article illustrates the global appeal that mHealth and Digital Health
services have, and the options that they can potentially provide centralised governments to meet the
needs of rising populations by providing effective care solutions.

Mobile health (mHealth), referring
to the use of mobile devices (or more
generally wireless technology) in healthcare delivery, is still in its early stages of
development but is attracting increasing
attention from healthcare providers and
payers in both developed and emerging
markets worldwide. By improving communications between healthcare providers, payers and patients, enabling the
remote monitoring of symptoms and
allowing patients to take greater control of their own treatment, mHealth
is already demonstrating that it can be
highly effective for delivering better and
more cost-effective patient outcomes.
mHealth has a particularly strong potential in China to address the country’s
rapidly ageing population. With few
children to support their parents and an
exploding middle class that views healthcare as a luxury good they can consume,
there is also a shortage of hospitals, clinics, physicians and nurses to meet these
demographic and economic demands.
With its unique market characteristics
and rapidly developing healthcare system, the country is facing particular challenges to provide basic primary healthcare equitably and universally, whilst also
providing quality, medically advanced
and patient-centric clinical care for those
who are able and willing to pay for premium services. China has the largest and
fastest growing ageing population in
the world (with one fifth of the world’s
elderly population), and the one-child
policy means that two ageing parents
have only one child to care for them in
their later years[1]. The Chinese middle
class is larger than the population of the
United States and already makes up more
than half of the urban population. With
their growing disposable incomes

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June 2014

and generally more advanced education
levels, the Chinese urban middle class
increasingly prefers international-style
medical services. While the Chinese government has aggressive plans to reform
the healthcare system in China, as illustrated by the healthcare reform goals in
the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), it
will require the adoption of transformative technologies and medical practices
to meet these demands. Innovative yet
practical mobile health solutions could
potentially fill many healthcare gaps in
China, where consumers are willing to
pay out of pocket for services from both
public and private medical service providers. It would also enable providers to
overcome difficulties in generating these
offerings within existing budget constraints.
Pilots of mHealth services are underway or already completed in a number
of provinces, and are delivering both
real benefits to consumers and potentially attractive returns to investors. For
example, the “12580” hospital booking
and reminder system in Guangdong,

Nei Menggu, Tianjin and Zhejiang supported by China Mobile has helped to
reduce the cost of healthcare delivery
and at the same time improve patients’
access to doctors and medical facilities.
Shanghai Jiaotong University has set up
a remote service centre to serve patients
equipped with mobile-enabled medical
devices provided by hospitals to monitor
and diagnose their conditions. Experience from these pilots will help to shed
light on how to address the problems of
uneven distribution of medical personnel and facilities across rural and urban
areas.
The pervasiveness of technology is
enabling the emergence of a new, more
patient-centric healthcare value chain.
For technology vendors, service providers and investors(1), mHealth offers
many opportunities. The mHealth survey projects that by 2017, China will be
the second largest mobile health market
after the United States, with an estimated
US$2.5 billion in revenues[2]. Development of this market will be further
facilitated by the establishment of elec-