Improving care to rural Chinese communities through the Haiyun program

Rural healthcare system in China is facing serious problems in these decades. The increasing financial expense of healthcare turns into a burden for the rural residents and government. Improving the healthcare quality for rural Chinese communities is of prime importance for promoting health equity in China. In this paper, we discuss the major problems we facing in the rural healthcare: the aging population, disequilibrium of healthcare resource, inefficient use of healthcare resources and high cost in healthcare. We then discuss how we undertake addressing challenges via developing integrated diagnostic terminals and cloud computing platform (Haiyun program), which are applicable for basic healthcare solutions and set up the low-cost healthcare industry. Haiyun program is designed to comprise the integrated diagnostic terminals which used mainly for embedded computation and provides seamless access, and cloud computing platform which used to provide standard medical information services for basic medical institutions intensively, which addressed the challenges in healthcare cost, point-of-care diagnostic and the population information. This paper discusses the programs and tools currently developed or being researched with the Haiyun program and achievements reduce the healthcare cost and increase accessibility, improve the health equity and quality in China.