Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 24, 2021
Date Accepted: May 27, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jun 1, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
China’s Health Informatization：Development, Status Quo and Challenges During COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
By applying advanced health information technology (HIT) to the healthcare field, health informatization helps optimize health resource allocation, improve healthcare services and realize universal health coverage. COVID-19 has tested the status quo of China’s health informatization, revealing challenges to the health care system.
Objective:
Our study analyzes the development, status quo and practice of China's health informatization, especially during COVID-19, and makes recommendations to address the health informatization challenges.
Methods:
We analyzed the development of China’s health informatization from five perspectives: health information infrastructure, information technology applications, financial and intellectual investment, health resource allocation and standard system, and discussed the status quo of the Internet plus healthcare service pattern during COVID-19. The main data sources included China’ policy documents and national plans on health informatization, commercial and public welfare sources and websites, public reports, institutional reports and academic papers. In particular, we extracted data from the 2019 National Health Informatization Survey released by the National Health Commission (NHC) in China.
Results:
China has developed its health information infrastructure and information technology applications, made significant financial and intellectual informatization investments and improved health resource allocations. Tested during COVID-19, China's status quo health informatization sytem, especially the Internet plus healthcare, has played a crucial role in monitoring and controlling the pandemic and allocating medical resources. However, an uneven distribution of health resources and insufficient financial and intellectual investment continue to challenge China's health informatization.
Conclusions:
China’s rapid development of health informatization has played a crucial role during COVID-19, providing a reference point for global pandemic prevention and control. To further promote health informatization, China’s health informatization needs to strengthen top-level design, increase investment and training, upgrade the health infrastructure and IT applications and improve Internet plus healthcare services.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.