JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

In order to assist the policy-making of the health informatics in the 13th Five-Year Plan of China, the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) organized a nationwide survey to investigate the informatization in the hospitals and the regional Health and Family Planning Commissions (HFPCs) in 2017. The survey obtained the valid results from 2021 of 2536 major hospitals, 26 of 32 provincial HFPCs and 307 of 420 municipal HFPCs. It covered the infrastructures, the information resources, the business applications, the systems and the organizations in the health informatics. Based on the survey, the paper presented the status quo of China’s health informatization, and analysed the possible reasons related with the progresses and the potential problems in terms of the country’s health information development policies. The result showed that the related policies had helped to construct the regional informatics platforms and start converging the data to the three centralized databases. The principle of informatics has been transiting from finance-centered to people-centered. On the other hand, the quality, the usability and the interoperability of the data still needed to be improved.