JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The construction of China's health information has experienced three stages: the exploration period, the rapid promotion period and the all-round development of informatization for health of the whole people, which has effectively supported the development of health care. During the “13th Five-Year Plan” period, a national-provincial-city-county four level platform interconnection system has initially taken shape. 78% of the hospitals have opened the convenience service function, and more than 90% of the tertiary hospitals have opened the appointment service function. 995 Internet hospitals have provided health consultation, psychological counseling remote consultation, follow-up of chronic diseases, drug distribution and other services. 29 provinces have officially launched electronic health cards. The epidemic situation monitoring and analysis systems have provided data support for accurate policy implementation.

Objective:

We analyze the health development plans of 27 provinces in China during the "14th Five-Year plan", explore the key tasks, similarities and differences of health informatization construction in each province, clarify the path of health informatization construction during the "14th Five-Year plan" Period, provide reference for the formulation of "14th Five-Year plan" health information planning in provinces of China and the development of health information in developing countries.

Methods:

We use the method of policy review to retrieve the websites of local people's governments and the official websites of the Health Commission to sort out the health development plans of provinces in China during the "14th Five-Year plan" period, and use content analysis and discourse analysis to conduct in-depth analysis of policy texts, and then study the key points of health informatization construction during the "14th Five-Year plan" period, as well as the similarities and differences among provinces.

Results:

The "14th Five-Year plan" health informatization in all provinces of China can be summarized into 10 major themes, including speeding up the construction of graded diagnosis and treatment system, promoting the high-quality development of public hospitals, and deepening the reform of medical security system. The distribution of the main points of health and health informatization construction in the eastern region is relatively balanced. In the central region, more attention is paid to using informatization to enable medical and health institutions to provide basic medical and public health services, to speed up the expansion of high-quality medical resources and to achieve a balanced regional layout. In the western region, the focus is to make up for shortcomings and weaknesses, to speed up the construction of grading diagnosis and treatment system by using informatization means, to strengthen the construction of public health system, and to improve the ability to deal with major public health emergencies.

Conclusions:

The policy content of each province can be well defined around the field of health informatization, but there are still some insufficient directivities of the discourse. The rationality of point-surface combination needs to be further optimized, and local considerations need to be fully taken into account, in the process of further formulating the health informatization planning, policy makers need to combine with local realities and formulate step-by-step development strategies.