Photo: Ray Ally
While Obama is trying to reform the healthcare system in the US, my recent hospital stay in Beijing has given me some first hand insight into the problems facing China’s healthcare. Which will be a huge opportunity for western medical brands to benefit from.
Despite having over 19,246 hospitals and more than 270,000 medical centres and clinics, the healthcare system is difficult to access and has unaffordable costs for most people. These issues along with the run down facilities and poor conditions are common complaints across China.
United Nations figures from 2003 ranked China 61st in health performance among the 192 UN countries, and the World Health Organization said the nation has one of the most unfair systems in the world.
However, earlier this year China unveiled a 10-year plan to reform its ailing medical system. An ambitious plan to provide fair and affordable healthcare for China’s population of 1.3 billion people by 2020. The initial phase would invest 850 billion yuan (US$124 billion) in the next three years.
The official document released by The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council declared;
By 2020, the world’s most populous country will have a basic health-care system that can provide “safe, effective, convenient and affordable” health services to urban and rural residents.
This welcome reform will upgrade existing hospitals and build thousands of new facilities that will all need new medical equipment. Western pharmaceutical and medical equipment companies like GE, Siemens and Philips are set to profit from China’s reform. The mainland is already the second home to GE Healthcare, which has a 40% share of the healthcare equipment market in China.
In the meantime growing numbers of China’s rising middle classes are looking to foreign hospitals for their medical care. These consumers like many Chinese, have a preference for foreign medical brands, which they perceive as higher quality, more reliable and trustworthy.
In my recent experience the hospital conditions were old and run down, but nothing out of the ordinary for many Chinese hospitals. As I lay on the examination bed I was comforted by seeing the GE logo on the side of the scanner. Now everyone knows that a brand is more than a logo, but it was a reassuring symbol in an otherwise worrying situation.
At the heart of every strong brand is a promise of trust and a commitment to delivering a unique brand experience in a differentiated and relevant way. Now it takes more than just equipment to make a good hospital and patient care is top on the list. However, having the world’s best brands will be a welcome aid to healthcare reform and a relief for it’s patients in China.