China's IT expense of medical industry to double by 2024: Report

BEIJING - China's medical IT market is expected to embrace a robust growth in the coming five years, according to a report from the global market research firm International Data Corporation.

The latest report predicted IT expenses of China's medical industry would reach 104.2 billion yuan ($14.6 billion) by 2024, nearly double the figure of 54.8 billion yuan registered in 2019, with a compound annual growth rate of 13.7 percent.

The market scale of China's medical application software is forecasted to amount to 32.7 billion yuan by 2024, surging from 16.2 billion yuan in 2019, the report added.

The strong performance was driven by the deepened reform of the medical and health care system, further medical digitalization and wide application of emerging technologies, the report pointed out, noting that the new technologies are of significance in COVID-19 containment, which will fuel the IT expenditure in the medical industry.

Medical software systems, based on the framework composed by the emerging technologies such as cloud computing, internet and big data, are supposed to flourish from 2020, Xiao Hongliang, a research manager of IDC said, adding that these systems are playing an underpinning role in accelerating the development of the whole industrial chains.