Digitization key to build a patient-centric health-care ecosystem in Shanghai

In the past decade, it’s been a great honour for Roche to witness, and play a role in, the amazing development of Shanghai as a key member of the International Business Leaders’ Advisory Council (IBLAC) for the Mayor of Shanghai. As Roche’s CEO, as well as an old friend of IBLAC, I have been attending the meeting for 10 years in a row and Roche has consolidated its expertise and global experience into a set of recommendations that best aligned with Shanghai’s development interests.

A decade ago, Roche focused on measures aimed at leveraging the pharmaceutical industry’s capacity to drive innovative economic growth and sustainably tackle health care challenges. Over recent years, Roche has also built digital innovation capabilities in life sciences and we are eager to support Shanghai’s ambition of becoming a smart city and a hub for technology innovation. Undoubtedly, the IBLAC has contributed a lot to the city’s economic growth and social progress, and being a part of this makes members like Roche so proud.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. As a reflection of China’s rapid development, Shanghai has been a trailblazer in adopting new policies in China. It is still a trailblazer today, especially in health care. The city is keen to adopt policies designed to promote digital health infrastructure and high-quality health-care services. New policies are introduced in Shanghai to increase the adoption of big data, AI, and new materials in health care, showing that the city is set to build a multifaceted infrastructure for the patientcentric digital health.

Today, digital technologies play an increasingly bigger role in traditional industries, and health care is shifting toward a patient-centric model across the globe. In alignment with the current global understanding of digital health care, Roche has developed its own pioneering insights, personalized health care. Meaningful data at scale offers rich information through advanced analytics, transforming into valuable outcomes to fuel the development of datadriven patient-centric health care.

As a committed partner, Roche is willing to share its industry expertise and international experience with the health care community in Shanghai and support its development. Therefore, Roche suggests that Shanghai focus on the following three areas to seize the emerging opportunities: 1) driving positive policy for health care data management; 2) building partnerships for stronger expertise; and 3) raising awareness for a better ecosystem.

Along with China’s national health-care initiatives, Shanghai has made great achievements in laying the groundwork for data-driven patient-centric digital health care. Roche believes that Shanghai could create guidelines for improving data management, data protection and data quality.

When seeking to improve data management, Shanghai can use the FAIR Data Principles for guidance to set goals. Jointly developed by experts around the world, these principles were used by the European Union to guide data management for its Horizon 2020 initiative and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative. Unlike other data principles, the FAIR Data Principles focus on how to better manage data and how to make it easier to find and process data.

Meanwhile, Shanghai can also create a policy framework to improve data security and protect patient privacy. It’s important to build public trust in data security too. This can be done by educating the public about how the policy for data protection is able to ensure data security.

Today, digital technologies can be used to support medical researches, clinical decisionmaking, non-clinical services, and decision-making in government. Various stakeholders in Shanghai have launched initiatives leveraging digital technologies to promote datadriven, patient-centric health care.

Shanghai can further build partnerships to maximise the use of digital technologies and medical data, and strive to create a patient-centric health-care ecosystem innovatively.

First, Shanghai can leverage technologies and data to pursue precise R&D focusing on the personalized needs of patients. The city’s Zhangjiang Hi-Tech