China's national health watchdog body held the first conference on the application and development of health care big data on Nov 3 in Beijing.

The conference was sponsored by the Center for Capacity Building and Continuing Education under the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC).

Yang Aiping, director of the center for capacity building and continuing education under the NHFPC addressed the opening ceremony.

"Today, we have lots of resources. What we need to do is to make better use of the resources," said Yang Xueshan, an industry insider and former deputy minister of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"To make it happen, we first need to establish the information infrastructure," said Yang, who's also an adjunct professor of Peking University.

According to an official with the NHFPC, health care big data is "an important basic strategic resource of China."

The ultimate goal of tapping health care big data is to offer one-stop health care service covering a person’s whole life.

Delegates from medical enterprises talked about how to achieve personalized medicine or precision medicine with the help of health care big data.

However, the cutting-edge method is not without problems, especially for China at the moment.

Chen Xiaoming, an industry insider and the former president of the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, said that many hospitals, especially those in the villages and towns, cannot make use of the big data because of inadequate technical resources.

"They may have some data, but not big data," added Chen. "The problems of big data security and isolation need to be addressed urgently."

The meeting, held at the Beijing Conference Center, attracted over 500 participants from the NHFPC, health industry associations and hospital presidents from across the country.

(SOURCE: NHFPC)