Unlocking Healthcare Data Value Chain to Promote Innovation, Development Across the Medical Service Ecosystem

Editor's note:

The International Business Leaders' Advisory Council for the Mayor (IBLAC) brings together top executives from leading multinationals to exchange insights on Shanghai's development strategy. Each company brings forward a paper that draws from their global practices and local insights. Shanghai Daily has selected and summarized some of the astute suggestions to this city.

The Outline of the 15th Five‑Year Plan (2026-2030) for National Economic and Social Development calls for building a "Digital China" over the next five years. At the same time, China and Shanghai have also specifically identified medical devices and medical robotics as strategic priorities for the growth of China's medical device ecosystem.

With world‑class medical institutions, leading clinicians, and an ecosystem of innovative healthcare technology companies, Shanghai is uniquely positioned to benefit from the healthcare data value chain.

Shanghai has already invested in strategic initiatives to overcome data access barriers. The Shanghai Medical Information Network Project connects 38 hospitals across the city by integrating diverse health-care data collection systems and applications. Data aggregated through this project has enabled the development of disease‑specific databases, accelerating scientific research and technological innovation.

However, Shanghai still faces constraints that limit its ability to fully realize the value of healthcare data. These challenges include the need for high-quality datasets, requirements for multimodal data inputs, effective data safety and security policies and safeguards, and streamlined pathways for industry to utilize data in compliance with laws and regulations.

Addressing these issues will be critical for Shanghai to achieve its goals. Best practices from around the world demonstrate that creating clear rules for data sharing and establishing institutionalized data safety mechanisms are critical.

As a global technology leader in minimally invasive care and the pioneer of robotic-assisted surgery (RAS), Intuitive believes that unlocking the potential of China's healthcare data value chain is not only essential to advancing the "Quintuple Aim," but will also drive the growth of digital and data-related industries.

Intuitive looks forward to sharing our global experience in using digital capabilities to enhance care and to work with Shanghai in developing a data‑powered healthcare innovation ecosystem. We propose several policy recommendations to the Shanghai municipal government for consideration:

1. Select several medical institutions with strong data infrastructure to pilot the development of high-quality RAS datasets. Building on the city's existing investments in data infrastructure, Shanghai could identify two to three hospitals with robust systems and established RAS programs to lead the creation of subspecialty RAS datasets. Select hospitals could pilot the collection of pre-operative, intra-operative, and post-operative data, as well as aggregating de-identified data on patient outcome as well as the patient and care team experience.

2. Explore new solutions to establish a secure data sharing model, building on these RAS dataset pilot programs. Pilot sites could carefully explore approaches including privacy‑preserving computation, trusted data spaces, and management of distributed multimodal data from pre-operative diagnostic tests and images, kinematic and video data, and patient reported outcomes.

3. Through these RAS dataset pilot programs, Shanghai could establish a "Shanghai Model" for healthcare data utilization – operational standards and guidelines for healthcare data management, medical AI product risk classification, and industry-hospital collaboration for the creation of subspecialty datasets. By doing so, Shanghai could fill gaps in existing policies on health-care data application and AI development, while creating benchmark practices that could be used in other regions, and around the globe.