Home use medical devices market in China

As the aged population base is growing rapidly in China, the demand of certain home use medical devices also increases sharply. Younger generation also focuses on prevention rather than treatment, when maintaining physical health is concerned. To fit the daily needs, more and more families in China keep devices like thermometer, blood pressure monitor, glucose meter, oxygen concentrator and etc. at home, young people are more comfortable with wearable devices which is in most cases connected to a smart phone.
 

In the Chinese home use medical device market, there is also a strong market trend of developing and deploying m-health products to replace the conventional products. The ‘Hardware-APP-Cloud’ module is adapted by more and more device manufacturers.
 

The market size of medical device in China is around RMB400 Billion by the end of 2014, but only 14% falls into home use device category. The share of home use devices will for sure expand as long as the strong market demand grows, and we can easily presume, that more and more innovative products will be available in the Chinese market in the coming years.

New Opportunities in Chinese Health Care Market

On 28 September 2013, the State Council of China issued ‘Several Opinions of the State Council on Speeding up the Development of Healthcare Services’, which was soon brought under the spotlight of the industry.

This document expressed a reform plan which will be guided by the authorities but driven by the market, focusing not only on medical care sector, but also health care sector.

The target of the development of Chinese healthcare services will result in a market size of 8.000 billion RMB with below major targets:

1. Drastic improvement in capability of medical care. This will rely on a balanced system in which the stake holders are non-profit & profit hospitals, public and non-public hospitals, medical treatment, rehabilitation and caring services.
2. Significant improvement in levels of health care management and standards of services. Traditional Chinese health care, caring of aged people, healthcare consultation, sports medical and health care touring services will be encouraged.
3. Improvement in health insurance mechanism. Commercial healthcare insurance should play a more important role in the entire healthcare insurance mechanism.
4. Expansion of supporting clusters of healthcare services. This refers to third party lab centers, third party imaging centers, R & D and manufacturing of (new) drugs, (new) medical and in-vitro devices, rehabilitation devices, healthcare products and fitness equipment.

To achieve the ambitious targets, the government will allow different forms of capitals to enter the market, treat facilities run by private capitals equally to public owned entities. 50%-100% of administrative fees will also be waived by the authorities.

This top-down reform offers tremendous opportunities to huge number of enterprises in the medical & health care industry, especially those prepared early birds.