Terms like “precision medicine” and “big data” have become buzzwords in the health-care sector in recent years and the industry of health big data is rapidly growing.
The city’s health commission is working on a project to collect resident health data from different sources to build a health big data bank that integrates medical resources to bring a healthier life to Shenzheners, the Guangzhou Daily reported.
The State Council rolled out guidance on promoting and regulating the development of health big data last year. Shenzhen is one of the nation’s pioneers in collecting health big data, according to the Daily.
Shenzhen is the first city in China to release a flu index on a weekly basis, providing up-to-date information so residents can get prepared for the flu and other related diseases. The index is a result from a comprehensive big data system that monitors, collects and analyzes real-time statistics in addition to making comparisons to data integrated over the past few years.
So far, the city’s health and family planning commission has already launched four disease indexes for residents — the flu index, the hand-foot-mouth disease risk index, the dengue fever index and the infectious diarrhea index.
All district governments in the city are working on a regional data bank for the health-care sector by breaking down the barriers between various hospitals and community health centers.
Nanshan District, for the first time in the country, launched an online system that shares all patients’ health information among all five district-level public hospitals and 87 community health centers eight years ago.
Residents can avoid repetitive diagnoses at different hospitals with a citywide health big data bank. Currently, patients have to undergo the same examination several times if they seek treatment in various hospitals.
With a unified data platform, images of the examinations are shared. The Luohu Hospital Group is developing an application that can store tens of millions of high-resolution medical images.
“The Cloud platform can also allow patients to seek out and communicate with doctors via the app,” said Jiang Dianwei, the head of the hospital group.
One of the existing challenges in developing a health big data bank is setting up standards, as there are too many sources from which data must be collected and many different methods for analyzing the data. Scholars and researchers are seeking the best way to set up standards for building a health big data bank.
