China Is Trying to Make AI Work for Health Care
A state-backed push is raising the question: Who pays?
China's "AI+ plan" has generated significant attention, but its implementation in healthcare, or "AI+ health," faces challenges. The country's AI efforts are aimed at transforming industries, but low-hanging fruit like industrial planning and supply chains have been exhausted. Health care, burdened by demographic pressures and disease, is a priority area for AI.
However, the main obstacles are data availability, data sharing, and cost-effectiveness. Practitioners grapple with issues such as usable hospital data, institutional cooperation, and reimbursement. Chinese hospitals hold vast amounts of data, but it is scattered, incompatible, and coded in different shorthand. Interoperability standards are recommendations, not requirements.
Data quality is another hurdle, as longitudinal data is needed for AI training, but Chinese medical records are mostly point-in-time snapshots. Privacy laws and the lack of technical capacity in hospital IT teams further complicate matters. Despite these challenges, Chinese experts see AI as a way to provide more accessible and efficient care.
However, the market has yet to see commercial success for most AI health products, as few are approved and reimbursed by public medical insurance. As the market for AI health products is still in its infancy, companies often focus on narrow, single-purpose tools rather than broad, medical foundation models.
Written by urgent.news from Foreign Policy's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
