Danish User-driven Innovation Works with Chinese Health-IT
With more than 20,000 hospitals and the Chinese government’s ambition to modernize the healthcare system with millions of investment, China has a huge health market which attracts many countries including Denmark.
Under the sister city agreement, Shanghai and Central Denmark Region (CDR) has identified healthcare as one of the three focus areas to have collaboration. One pilot collaboration project in this area is established between the Chinese IT company Tanrui and Danish Alexandra Institute. The project already shows good results.
Some cities in China are undergoing the process to digitalize citizen’s health information and try to share it among hospitals. The Shanghai partner of the pilot project – Tanrui Information Technologies Co. Ltd goes further. It is integrating citizens’ health information from individual hospitals to make it possible for citizens to check their electronic health record (EHR) on pc and even mobile. At this stage, the company has made the prototypes of EHR both for pc and mobile. Technically, the company doesn’t need help or cooperation with other parties. The point of collaborating with the Danish side until now is how to make a system of EHR that Chinese citizens like to use. Due to reasons like culture influence and administration disadvantages, less companies in China will involve end-users and customers during the process of developing products which usually will dissatisfy end-users. That’s why the Danish user-driven innovation works here. The Danish partner – Caretech team from Alexandra Institute develops plans for the activities involving end-users together with Tanrui during the process of the system development and after the prototype finishes.
Until now the Danish team has come to China twice. The first visit is to Shanghai in June 2010. The latest one is for activities in December 2010 in Zhuhai – a south city in China in which Tanrui will first launch its system. Citizens here will be the first end-users and the evaluation of the prototype is so carried out here. Tanrui is very happy to have this cooperation with the Danish side as they say that the user-driven innovation method really helps them to get a lot of valuable opinions from end-users and helps them to improve the system to make it more satisfying.
As CDR is going through a similar healthcare system change – information sharing among hospitals, companies like Cetrea and Systematic show great interests in Tanrui’s project. Tanrui also expresses the eagerness to meet the companies to learn from each other and discuss more potential collaborations. The next step will be Tanrui goes to CDR in May 2011 and have face to face meeting with the companies and have on-site visits to hospitals and other organizations.