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China's primary health-care reform

Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, which threatens global public health, is a major contributor to liver-related morbidity and mortality. Examinations for liver diseases related to chronic HBV infection—including laboratory tests, ultrasounds, computed tomography (CT), and liver biopsies—may take up medical resources, particularly since they overlap in most instances. Thus, there is an urgent need to establish an economical and effective diagnosis method in order to streamline the medical process for HBV-related diseases. Using complex network models constructed based on clinical blood tests, we provide such a method by defining the novel measure of functional resilience to assess patients’ liver conditions. By combining network models and dynamics, we discovered the pivotal items and their corresponding thresholds, which can guide further research on preventing disease deterioration in critical states of these diseases. The macro-averaged precision of our method, functional resilience, is 84.74%, whereas the macro-averaged precision of physicians’ experience without assistance from imaging or biopsy is 55.63%. From an economic perspective, our approach could save the equivalent of at least 30 USD per visit for most Chinese patients and at least 400 USD per visit for most US patients, compared with general diagnostic methods. Globally, this will add to savings of at least 10.5 billion USD annually. Our method can comprehensively evaluate the condition of patients’ livers and help avert the waste of medical resources during the diagnosis of liver disease by reducing excessive imaging exams.

China implemented the first phase of its National Healthy Cities pilot program from 2016-20. Along with related urban health governmental initiatives, the program has helped put health on the agenda of local governments while raising public awareness. Healthy City actions taken at the municipal scale also prepared cities to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, after intermittent trials spanning the past two decades, the Healthy Cities initiative in China has reached a crucial juncture. It risks becoming inconsequential given its overlap with other health promotion efforts, changing public health priorities in response to the pandemic, and the partial adoption of the Healthy Cities approach advanced by the World Health Organization (WHO). We recommend aligning the Healthy Cities initiative in China with strategic national and global level agendas such as Healthy China 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing an integrative governance framework to facilitate a coherent intersectoral program to systemically improve population health. Achieving this alignment will require leveraging the full spectrum of best practices in Healthy Cities actions and expanding assessment efforts.

Tsinghua-Toyota Joint Research Fund “Healthy city systems for smart cities” program.

One primary action plan in the Healthy China 2030 initiative is to build innovativepatient referral models for health care reform in China. To ensure people have sufficient and equitable health care access when the patient referral policy is enforced, a systematic evaluation of its effects on the health care system is needed. In this paper, we focus on one health policy metric, the health care accessibility, by considering the patient transfer between different levels of health care facilities under the context that the need for specialized treatment cannot be fulfilled by a low-level facility. We then propose three conceptual patient referral models and a hierarchical two-step floating catchment area method to evaluate health care accessibility in different patient referral scenarios. A case study of hospitals in Beijing, China has been conducted to justify the proposed model, revealing the spatial inequality of health care accessibility. We find that while the patient referral can leverage health care resources to a certain extent, such effects are only prominent in areas with good coverage of health care facilities; and the efficiency of the health care system can be compromised in areas with limited health care provisioning. To this end, the study provides scientific evidence for the planning and reform of the health care policy in the Healthy China 2030 initiative.

Managing noncommunicable diseases through primary healthcare has been identified as the key strategy to achieve universal health coverage but is challenging in most low- and middle-income countries. Stroke is the leading cause of death and disability in rural China. This study aims to determine whether a primary care-based integrated mobile health intervention (SINEMA intervention) could improve stroke management in rural China.

Based on extensive barrier analyses, contextual research, and feasibility studies, we conducted a community-based, two-arm cluster-randomized controlled trial with blinded outcome assessment in Hebei Province, rural Northern China including 1,299 stroke patients (mean age: 65.7 [SD:8.2], 42.6% females, 71.2% received education below primary school) recruited from 50 villages between June 23 and July 21, 2017. Villages were randomly assigned (1:1) to either the intervention or control arm (usual care). In the intervention arm, village doctors who were government-sponsored primary healthcare providers received training, conducted monthly follow-up visits supported by an Android-based mobile application, and received performance-based payments. Participants received monthly doctor visits and automatically dispatched daily voice messages. The primary outcome was the 12-month change in systolic blood pressure (BP). Secondary outcomes were predefined, including diastolic BP, health-related quality of life, physical activity level, self-reported medication adherence (antiplatelet, statin, and antihypertensive), and performance in “timed up and go” test. Analyses were conducted in the intention-to-treat framework at the individual level with clusters and stratified design accounted for by following the prepublished statistical analysis plan. All villages completed the 12-month follow-up, and 611 (intervention) and 615 (control) patients were successfully followed (3.4% lost to follow-up among survivors). The program was implemented with high fidelity, and the annual program delivery cost per capita was US$24.3. There was a significant reduction in systolic BP in the intervention as compared with the control group with an adjusted mean difference: −2.8 mm Hg (95% CI −4.8, −0.9; p = 0.005). The intervention was significantly associated with improvements in 6 out of 7 secondary outcomes in diastolic BP reduction (p < 0.001), health-related quality of life (p = 0.008), physical activity level (p < 0.001), adherence in statin (p = 0.003) and antihypertensive medicines (p = 0.039), and performance in “timed up and go” test (p = 0.022). We observed reductions in all exploratory outcomes, including stroke recurrence (4.4% versus 9.3%; risk ratio [RR] = 0.46, 95% CI 0.32, 0.66; risk difference [RD] = 4.9 percentage points [pp]), hospitalization (4.4% versus 9.3%; RR = 0.45, 95% CI 0.32, 0.62; RD = 4.9 pp), disability (20.9% versus 30.2%; RR = 0.65, 95% CI 0.53, 0.79; RD = 9.3 pp), and death (1.8% versus 3.1%; RR = 0.52, 95% CI 0.28, 0.96; RD = 1.3 pp). Limitations include the relatively short study duration of only 1 year and the generalizability of our findings beyond the study setting.

In this study, a primary care-based mobile health intervention integrating provider-centered and patient-facing technology was effective in reducing BP and improving stroke secondary prevention in a resource-limited rural setting in China.

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03185858.

Lijing Yan and colleagues evaluate a mobile health intervention for secondary stroke prevention in China.