Part II Opportunities and challenges

1    Opportunities

1.1    Increased medical expenditure

According to the 2021 Statistical Communique of China's Health Development, it is preliminarily estimated that the total national health expenditure in 2021 was 7559.36 billion CNY, the per capita total health expenditure was 5348.1 CNY, and the total health expenditure accounted for 6.5% of GDP. In 2021, the average outpatient cost of hospitals per time was 329.2 CNY, which was 1.5% higher than that of the previous year at the current price and 0.6% higher at the comparable price; the average hospitalization cost per time was 11002.9 CNY, 3.6% higher than that of the previous year at the current price and 2.7% higher at the comparable price. The average daily hospitalization cost was 1191.7 CNY. The per capita financial subsidy standard for basic public health service projects increased from 74 CNY in 2020 to 79 CNY in 2021. It can be seen that China's overall health expenditure is constantly increasing, and the per capita health expenditure also shows a trend of synchronous growth.

1.2 Opportunities for prevention and control of public health

IVD has significant advantages in the detection and prevention of infectious diseases, and can play an important role in pathogen screening. There is great demand for the diagnosis and treatment of seasonal diseases and the examination of common respiratory and intestinal diseases, including a large number of outpatient and emergency examination. Due to the needs for the prevention and control of COVID-19, many PCR testing products have emerged, which are basically operated based on gene amplification laboratories, but many primary prevention and control sites still lack effective nucleic acid testing means. Therefore, in this case, mobile molecular rapid test is very suitable for the monitoring needs of infectious diseases at the grassroot level. At the same time, we predict that the state will pay more attention to nosocomial infection monitoring, and molecular rapid test products will be more favored.

1.3  Overseas development

The export value of China's IVD products in 2021 should be more than 10 billion USD, making China one of the major producers of IVD products in the world.

At present, China has one of the most complete product lines in the IVD field. There are Chinese enterprises engaged in the R&D and production in all branches of the seven major product lines, and they are constantly expanding overseas exports. Some enterprises have set up production bases overseas, and invested in and held overseas enterprises. In the future, China's IVD industry will go global more and more significantly.

1.4  The opening of multi-birth policy promotes the test for eugenics

According to the 2021 Statistical Communique of China's Health Development, in 2021, the antenatal examination rate of pregnant and lying-in women was 97.6%, and the postnatal visit rate was 96.0%. Compared with the previous year, the antenatal examination rate and the postnatal visit rate both increased. In 2021, the systematic management rate of children under the age of 3 was 92.8%, basically equal to that of the previous year, the systematic management rate of pregnant and lying-in women was 92.9%, slightly higher than the previous year. In 2021, free examination was provided to 8.23 million couples planning to get pregnant, covering an average of 93.5% of the target population. It is noteworthy that the proportion of second children in the births increased from about 30% in 2013 to about 43% in 2021[2]. In the context of the full opening of the multi-birth policy, the risk of fetal chromosomal abnormalities will increase with the increase of the pregnant woman's age. This trend has led to the demand of the maternal and child market for prenatal screening, prenatal examination (such as monogenic inherited disease screening), assisted reproduction and genetic screening of newborns. In the next few years, the scale of relevant segments in China will expand rapidly.

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Next: Opportunities Pt.2