Two Sessions Voice: What was mentioned in the medical device field this year?

Government Work Report Unveils New Opportunities: Elderly Care and Rehabilitation

The 2025 Government Work Report mentions actively addressing the aging population, improving policies and mechanisms for the development of elderly care services and industries, and vigorously developing the silver-hair economy. Promoting community-supported home-based elderly care, strengthening care for disabled elderly people, increasing support for elderly catering services, the purchase and rental of rehabilitation assistive devices, expanding inclusive elderly care services, and promoting the development of rural elderly care services. Numerous proposals and suggestions focusing on keywords such as elderly care and rehabilitation have emerged during this year's Two Sessions, releasing new growth points in the medical device market. Yu Qingming, a national People's Congress deputy, director of China Medical Investment Co., Ltd., and director of Guoyao Liren Exhibition Co., Ltd., suggested promoting the innovation of "artificial intelligence + elderly-friendly" medical devices to meet the needs of smart home-based elderly care. Yu Qingming called for full-chain support for the innovation of elderly-friendly home medical devices and rehabilitation assistive devices, the establishment of a special fund for innovation in elderly-friendly medical devices; providing certain tax incentives for enterprises to develop innovative elderly-friendly medical devices; accelerating the review and approval of related products, expanding medical insurance coverage, and including some elderly-friendly products in the medical insurance catalog; promoting the application of intelligent nursing robots in pilot cities for home and community elderly care services reform, and cultivating a large-scale market. Zhang Yunquan, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, also brought a proposal this year's Two Sessions advocating for accelerating the development of elderly care robots. Zhang Yunquan suggested that elderly care robots be included in the national "15th Five-Year" strategic plan, focusing on supporting Liaoning, Shanghai, and Chongqing to build industrial clusters, reducing the threshold for product use through fiscal subsidies and tax incentives, and promoting community and family elderly care robot development action plans. Strive to form a number of globally influential elderly care robot industrial clusters and technological innovation centers by 2030. Rehabilitation medical devices have also recently caught the wind of development. Liu Qingfeng, a national People's Congress deputy and chairman of iFLYTEK, suggested focusing on supporting the application of artificial intelligence technology in areas such as hearing impairment, visual impairment, motor impairment, and mental disorders for technological breakthroughs and product transformation; encouraging enterprises to develop assistive technology products with independent intellectual property rights and high added value, cultivating a group of specialized and innovative assistive technology enterprises, and promoting the high-quality development of the assistive technology industry. Li Xiaokun, a national People's Congress deputy, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and president of Wenzhou Medical University, proposed that relevant departments can separately establish a series of key research and development projects in the field of assistive technology rehabilitation, clarify the direction of project topics, support innovation in rehabilitation medical technology, and promote the widespread application of scientific and technological achievements in the practice of disability rehabilitation.

High-End Domestic Medical Devices Break Through: Innovation and Cooperation, Industrial Chain Upgrades, and Procurement Support

As a highly competitive, technology-intensive industry, breakthroughs in high-end medical devices require efforts across the entire chain, including deep integration of industry, academia, research, and medicine, as well as the development of commercialization pathways.
Yu Xubo, a national People's Congress deputy, chairman and secretary of the Party Committee of General Technic Group, put forward three suggestions on "Promoting the high-quality development of the domestic high-end medical equipment industry," namely, enhancing independent innovation capabilities, improving the industrial chain ecosystem, and optimizing procurement and financial support.

Regarding improving innovation efficiency and industry-academia-research cooperation, Yuan Yuanyu, a national People's Congress deputy and chairman of MicroPort Medical, also mentioned in an interview: "Currently, our country's technological innovation still faces the problem of technology transformation rate. If enterprises are taken as the main body of innovation in the early stage, more resources, strength, and policies will be tilted towards enterprises, and enterprises can lead the innovation consortium, jointly with universities and research institutes to promote the solution of certain industrial problems and clinical problems. Innovation can be more efficient, closer to the market, closer to the needs of the industry, and better promote innovation from the transformation level." Regarding the problem of financing difficulties for innovative enterprises, Geng Funeng, a national People's Congress deputy and chairman of Good Doctor Group, suggested that the government should increase fiscal investment, guide social capital to support enterprise technological innovation, especially in the field of high and new technologies, establish a tiered support system of "basic research-applied research-industrial transformation," help enterprises increase R&D investment, encourage enterprises to strengthen the construction of independent intellectual property rights, and further enhance innovation capabilities. In the academic research community, Yang Jiancheng, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and deputy director of the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "High-end medical equipment is an important symbol of national scientific and technological progress and an important cornerstone for safeguarding people's lives and health. This year, one of the key tasks I am promoting is to encourage continuous innovation in high-end medical devices."

Yang Jiancheng suggested that relevant national departments should introduce special policies for high-end medical equipment to enable scientific research achievements to be quickly transformed into new productive forces. The clinical end is also opening up a green channel for breakthroughs in high-end domestic medical devices. Ao Hushan, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and executive vice president of the Chinese Society of Cardiothoracic Anesthesia, proposed that medical data should be moderately opened to medical technology innovation enterprises to help enterprises accurately grasp market demand, accelerate the research and development process of innovative products and high-end medical equipment, and improve the applicability and pertinence of research and development results. End-use is an important link in the industrial chain. Ao Hushan suggested that a green channel should be opened for innovative products to enter hospitals at the national policy level, and the medical insurance reimbursement system should be optimized simultaneously, appropriately increasing the reimbursement amount for scientifically verified innovative medical products. According to predictions by CCID Consulting, during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period (2026-2030), the scale of China's high-end medical device market is expected to reach US$312 billion, accounting for 28% of the global market.