The booth of the Guizhou food safety cloud at the Guizhou Green Expo?Big Health, Pharmaceutical Industry Fair on Friday (Photo: Huang Ge/GT)
Holding the country's big data hub promise, Southwest China's Guizhou Province is stepping up efforts to build a complete big health industrial chain shored up by medicine, healthcare, sports and management to attain complementary growth in the big health and big data sectors.
Developing the healthcare industry is one of the biggest tasks and challenges facing China during its economic transformation, Chi Fulin, director of the China (Hainan) Institute for Reform and Development, told the Guizhou Green Expo?Big Health, Pharmaceutical Industry Fair on Friday. The country will witness its healthcare sector grow faster than in any other place in the world over the next 10 years.
The changes in the consumption structure and the demand structure of urban and rural areas, as well as the increasingly aging population have triggered the need to promote the growth of the health sector, Chi said.
The fair, which kicked off on Friday in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou Province, attracted about 2,500 companies from both home and abroad. At the opening ceremony, the companies signed deals for 38 health and pharmaceutical projects worth some 20.59 billion yuan ($3.08 billion).
Rising in Southwest China
With the increasingly enhanced foundation of its healthcare industry and the improvement of its infrastructure, Guizhou, surrounded by green forests and rich in natural resources, has advantages- in developing a large health and pharmaceutical industry, according to a report on the industry's development released by the local government in July.
The area for planting Chinese medical herbs in Guizhou reached 351,300 hectares in 2015, ranking third in the country, and the province's total herb output approached 2.2 million tons, according to the report.
In recent years, the province has also seen increasing growth in sectors such as eco-agriculture and tourism, and the Guizhou government has put great effort into nurturing big health companies and luring major healthcare projects in a bid to create a comprehensive big health industry, experts said.
In 2015, the number of big health enterprises in the province stood at about 170, with 46 firms' output worth 100 million yuan, the Guizhou provincial government's report said. During the same year, 380 health and pharmaceutical projects were under construction in Guizhou, with a combined investment of 43.02 billion yuan.
Moreover, the province has played a leading role in the country's big data industry since 2014, and has set up a big data sharing platform for the provincial government, which offers a platform for attracting healthcare projects and start-ups.
Big data plus big health
Integrating big health with big data will become one of the highlights of the development of Guizhou's big health and pharmaceutical industry in the future, said Chi, the director.
In Guizhou, the industry has focused on the combination of big data and healthcare management, and many relevant platforms have been set up, including the "Guizhou food safety cloud" and "big data+chronic disease management," the government report noted.
Guizhou Bailing Group Pharmaceutical Co worked with China's Internet titan Tencent Holdings in May 2015 to create a "big data+chronic disease management" platform that aims to explore a new model for healthcare services, company chairman Jiang Wei told the Global Times at the fair on Friday.
Guizhou Bailing is one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in the province.
"Almost 10,000 people in the province have received this kind of healthcare management, which is now being promoted within the province," Jiang said.
Another local leading pharmaceutical company Guizhou Yibai Pharmaceutical Co is also trying to integrate big data into its healthcare services.
"Over the next few year, Yibai plans to collect about 1 million tumor cases to create a big data platform to share the cases with medical institutions across the country," Lin Ke, director of the company's public relations department, told the Global Times on Friday.
In May, the local government released guidelines for promoting the combination of medical and healthcare services with big data to focus on the growth of smart healthcare services based on big data, the "Internet Plus" initiative and the telemedicine, according to information from the fair.
Future prospects
The value of Guizhou's health and pharmaceutical industry is set to reach 200 billion yuan by the end of 2020 through the setup of an industrial chain shored up by medicine, healthcare, sports and management, according to the government report.
The province plans to bring in 10 model enterprises that can generate 10 billion yuan in annual revenue by 2020 to help it take the lead in the country's health industry, according to the local government.
The industry has great development potential in Guizhou as the local government has offered support policies such as boosting product research and development, lowering the access threshold and encouraging financial institutions to make more loans to the industry, experts said, noting that the province also rolled out many policies to attract professionals to the local healthcare industry.
With strong government support, China's health and pharmaceutical industry has achieved remarkable growth, but the sector's contribution to the domestic economy is still less than that in some other countries and regions, said Liu Wei, an industry analyst at Shenzhen-based CIC Industry Research Center.
"Although the country's health industry nurtures many companies, it still lacks titans with competitive advantages in the sector," Liu told the Global Times on Monday, noting that China's healthcare industry has a lot of room to develop.
