China Medical Big Data Status — Pain and Outlook Coexist
By: Parhat Hebibul
Tags: Marketing, China, AI, Medical, Big Data

In recent years, including new drug research and development, social medical insurance, health management, and other fields, a more complete system and new market rules are gradually taking shape.

Since the “Healthy China 2030 Plan Outline” was released as a blueprint and action plan to promote the construction of a healthy China, the Chinese medical and health industry is undergoing dramatic changes and innovations. In recent years, it has included many new drug development, social medical insurance, health management, etc. In this field, more complete systems and new market rules are gradually taking shape.

At the same time, China’s medical big data industry has also ushered in the release of a large number of industry norms and policy opinions. In fact, the domestic medical big data industry is in the stage of rapid construction, the scale of the medical informatization market is increasing year by year, the project construction results have gradually landed, and a large amount of capital and enterprise participants have poured into the market. With the gradual growth and penetration of the industry, it has promoted the advancement of production in many fields including pharmaceutical research and development, public health monitoring, personal health management, medical diagnosis and diagnosis, and is considered to have entered an initial favorable period. However, compared with other industries boosted by Internet technology, the overall construction speed of China’s medical big data industry is still slightly weak.

Throughout the history of the industry, the development of domestic medical big data can be traced back to the new round of medical reform in 2009. The construction of electronic medical records and other medical informatization is a key task. So far, the industry has had 10 years of massive data accumulation. In fact, the future development of domestic medical big data is huge, especially in the era of the rise of innovative drugs. Market demand is strong. However, due to many problems in the circulation and sharing of medical data and other aspects, even after laying the foundation for the construction of medical informatization for ten years, it appears lonely information islands one after another, which hinders the development of the industry.

Three difficulties in data collection

From the process point of view, big data includes multiple links such as data output, data collection, data storage, data processing, data analysis, and data application. Each link has a complete supply and demand scenario, which is constructed by market participants. Starting a smooth industrial value chain, the special is that, because it involves medical and internet information security issues at the same time, multiple regulatory agencies have also exercised regulatory power over the industry in a staggered manner.

From the point of view of the source and output of data, medical institutions such as hospitals and clinics generate massive amounts of medical data on a daily basis, which is the main source of raw data. However, due to the difficulty of breaking traditional concepts and the long-term lack of laws and regulations various factors such as the market’s incentive mechanism and a large amount of data are too heavy for medical institutions to “merge into the warehouse”. The first is the complex medical information system of medical institutions. The development cost of information systems in domestic medical institutions has been high, and the hospital systems are independent of each other, with different interfaces and different standards. The organization’s data is difficult to communicate and difficult to share.

Although as early as 2002, the “Basic Functional Specification of Hospital Information System” issued by the Ministry of Health clearly stated the basic requirements that commercial hospital information systems must meet, but in reality faced with huge operating costs, few hospitals can meet this requirement.

Secondly, due to various data standards differences, operational problems during entry, data loss and other factors caused by data loss and data errors, it also led to follow-up medical big data companies in the face of quality, particle and other dimensions are all in the case of uneven medical data, it is difficult to carry out effective data processing and development work.

What is gratifying is that both national regulators and major medical institutions have begun to deeply understand this problem, and gradually began to strive to improve this situation from within the scope. The country has issued a number of policies to support the development of medical big data. From 2016 June to 2018, there are several plans, guidelines, policies were released by the country, which more suggest and mention about the issues of data sharing, safety, standards and favorable policy and helps.

At the same time, more and more medical and health institutions not only realize the great value of data, but also gradually establish standardized data access standards and procedures, they actively seek the cooperation of third-party enterprises to the system improving and modifying. At present, many domestic medical and health institutions have achieved a step ahead in the construction of this aspect, and some institutions have even passed the national five-level assessment of medical and health information interconnection.

In the entire data collection process, the enterprise plays a more important role here. Domestic companies mainly focus on data collection, storage, processing and analysis. Current development situation, the data collection market is more mature than other markets. The relevant participants are mostly software and hardware manufacturers, medical equipment or wearable device manufacturers. But for these companies, there are still three difficulties in collecting raw data:

Difficult data collection

The medical field itself is highly professional and sensitive, and the medical industry has always been highly regulated by the government, with high barriers to participation in the industry, and the interests of the parties involved are also complicated and have extremely high requirements for the industrial resources of the enterprise. In addition, the lack of unified standards and specifications for data output specifications and collection tools make data quality difficult to grasp, and companies often need to pay higher costs to obtain high-quality medical data.

2. Compliance risk of data collection is high

Medical data is highly professional and sensitive, especially user data privacy involves dual protection of ethics and regulations. Even hospitals do not know what kind of data can be shared, and what are the risks after sharing the data externally. Moreover, due to the long-term lag in the construction of industry laws and regulations, the data ownership and use rights are unclear, data sharing lacks management, data applications lack access and access mechanisms, and some data have compliance issues.

3. Always face data security challenges

The large-scale application of the internet has also brought a huge risk of public privacy data leakage. The current global form of network data security is grim and the number of data leakage incidents continues to increase, causing more and more harm, especially big data because of its huge value and hidden the centralized storage management model has become the key target of network attacks. Therefore, enterprises must not only ensure the security of their basic components, but also provide security for the data and applications running on them, as well as provide security protection for the data flow process in business applications. This puts extremely high requirements on the enterprise’s data security protection technology.

Market demand has spurred the rapid development of the medical big data industry

In a sense, the market’s incentive mechanism may be one of the most important contributing factors to promote the construction of data interaction standards for upstream and downstream players in the industry chain. On the supply side, medical institutions also hope to convert the “sleep” data accumulated over the years into value and gain more operating profits. On the demand side, companies including pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies urgently need big data to enter application scenarios to reduce their own research and development costs or operating costs. Even doctors and experts hope to obtain follow-up data after patient treatment to support their own academic research.

Therefore, enterprises have a large number of market cooperation opportunities. For example, in some countries, such as the United States and Japan, where the development of the industry is relatively mature, the business models of many startups are: on the one hand, providing medical institutions with cheaper services, so as to continuously collect and accumulate data; on the other hand, selling data to other startups that focus on the technical application level or providing it to other companies with data application scenarios after processing and analysis, the biggest demanders in this chain are major pharmaceutical companies.

A considerable number of enterprises in China have accumulated a large amount of data by building a complete product background, and some companies will do some transformation work on some redundant unstructured data, and the wind direction recently discussed in the industry has also been from how to accumulate data and precipitate data. It has gradually become a topic of data industrial applications and other topics. It also shows that the work of enterprises in data collection is getting smoother.

Safety regulations are the foundation of industry development

As for compliance issues, it is inevitable that the construction of laws and regulations will lag behind the development trajectory of any industry. “National Health and Medical Big Data Standards, Security and Service Management Measures” made detailed provisions. However, the current “measures” are still laws and regulations that are of reorientation significance. In practice, there is still a lack of specific operational details, norms and procedures to lead the “go for the goal”

So at present, hospitals and enterprises have concerns, and even in terms of ownership, some companies have proposed the concept of “data barriers”, thinking that these medical big data are the company’s core assets. Therefore, to completely solve this problem requires constant balance and game between “privacy protection” and “industrial development”. Current actual situation of the industry, privately-owned enterprises obtain data through scientific research cooperation with medical institutions.

The “national team” enterprises are authorized to obtain medical data of a locality through government-led cooperation. For example, CLP data is led by the government and authorized to aggregate and manage hospital data in a region. At this level, CLP Data’s “national team” will be more reliable in terms of data compliance security.

“National team” is the main force to solve the problem of medical data

At present, the current domestic construction situation in the medical big data industry is still in the early stage. Fortunately, with the efforts of the state and enterprises, China’s medical big data industry is developing rapidly and steadily.

In the first half of 2017, within three months, the “national team” of the medical big data industry-China Healthcare Medical Big Data Industry Development Corporation, China Healthcare Medical Big Data Technology Development Corporation, China Healthcare Medical Big Data Co., Ltd. announced preparations for the establishment of the three major groups quickly.

The three major groups were led by the unified organization of the former National Health and Family Planning Commission, with state-owned capital as the mainstay, back supported by the three major telecom operators, several state-owned banks and other state-owned enterprises.

At the same time, the five major medical and health big data regional centers in Shandong, Jiangsu, Guizhou, Fujian, and Anhui were established. They respectively undertook national pilot projects such as the national health and medical big data center, regional center, application development center and industrial park construction. Undertake the task of promoting the overall construction of the industry and the cultivation of the industry ecology and continue to deepen their responsibilities, actively promote market cooperation or introduce private enterprises to establish joint venture companies.

Jin Xiaotao, the former deputy director of the National Health and Family Planning Commission and chairman of the China Society of Health Information Technology and Health Medical Big Data, emphasized that the operating principle of the medical data “national team” is “government-led, market operation”. Under the supervision of the Big Data Office, the “national team” will have to undertake the investment and operation of the National Health and Medical Big Data Center and Industrial Park. With the goal of ensuring the safety of health care big data, invest in key enterprises in the industry and breakthrough core technologies; use financial means to promote the incubation and cultivation of the health industry, build a health care big data industry ecosystem, and promote the construction of national basic health care big data.

The establishment of “three major groups and five major regional centers” is equivalent to starting to mine the “gold” of medical data from the national level.

Big data empowers various medical companies

How to process the “gold” into products after excavation requires the participation of enterprises and capital provides assistance for the development of medical enterprises.

Recently, under the circumstance of the epidemic, Inspur Health announced the completion of A round of financing of 100 million yuan, strengthen data value-added service capabilities and the provision of internet service products, cooperate with more regions and large medical institutions, and accelerate the creation of a personal life-cycle health management platform service. This is really not easy, and it proves that capital is optimistic about the medical big data industry. Recently, Jingtai Technology and Zhongsheng Pharmaceutical released important progress, and chloroquine may become a new drug for coronary pneumonia. This is an empirical study of using big data and artificial intelligence to accelerate the development of new drugs.

Another example is the cooperation of CLP Data with the Medical Federation, Senyi Intelligence, and WuXi PharmaTech. As the “national team” of China Healthcare Big Data Industry Development, CLP Data, how to give play to each shareholder’s advantage and cultivate the core capabilities of the National Healthcare Healthcare Big Data Industry Development Group’s security + intelligence is the top priority.

In 2018, CLP Data participated in the D round of financing of the Medical Association (now Almond Group), and the total financing of the theory is 1 billion yuan. At that time, the company Almond Group was already deeply involved in the doctor sector, but the possibility of expansion to the patient side or the pharmaceutical factory side is very low on both sides. If there is a strategic investment in CLP Data, it will be carried out with CLP Data Cooperation, Almond Group can expand horizontally, and the pattern is opened at once.

With the full implementation of the Penguin Doctor Clinic created by the Medical Federation, Sequoia China and Tencent, and then signed with CLP Data, on the whole, the HMO (Health Maintenance Organization), which has been pursued by CEO Wang Shirui of Almond Group for many years, has finally completed the puzzle

Similarly, the core business of Senyi Intelligent, established in April 2016, is to solve the pain points of medical big data, transform low-value data into high-quality data through data governance, and promote data-driven medical research AI applications service of medical management and patient services. As a technology company, Senyi Smartbook is to do a scientific research platform and natural language word segmentation processing, data structure. After cooperating with CLP Data, it transformed into a data service company. After entering the hospital through the scientific research platform, the data of CLP can be used to directly analyze the activity of the drug delivery plant. It transformed from a technology company into an operating company.

In addition to this, it is worth noting that CLP Data and WuXi PharmaTech joined forces, and CLP-WuXi came into being. It relies on the national health and medical big data service platform and national health and medical big data security platform built by CLP Data, and integrates WuXi PharmaTech’s professional capabilities and rich experience in new drug research and development and the big health industry to provide partners with drug research and development, post-marketing drug efficacy evaluation, to the entire industry chain of distribution and sales, integrated health and medical big data analysis products and solutions.

In fact, in the medical industry, similar to Zero Krypton Technology, Yiduyun, and Taimei Medical began to use medical big data to provide services very early. For example, as a provider of artificial intelligence and medical big data solutions, Zero Krypton Technology, they established in 2014, relying on the core technology and capabilities in medical big data integration, processing and analysis, for the society and industry, government departments, all levels medical institutions, domestic and foreign medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies provide integrated solutions for medical big data, as well as integrated services such as AI-assisted decision-making systems, full-process management of patients, hospital public opinion monitoring and brand building, pharmaceutical equipment R & D, and insurance fee control. The company’s D round of financing in 2018 has reached 1 billion yuan.

Overall, although the domestic health and medical big data industry still have many problems and various development obstacles based on the specificity of the industry itself. In the long run, there is a huge potential space for the development of this industry, rising in Healthy China in the context of national strategy. In the future, with the deepening of industry-related services, humans may be able to predict the outbreak of epidemic diseases and reduce medical costs, and patients will also enjoy more convenient services. Traditional public health management and medical models will inevitably undergo disruptive changes.

Source: VCBEAT