"Domestic hospitals are mostly imported medical equipment procurement" is not very accurate, the real situation is that the domestic hospitals are mostly imported high-end medical equipment procurement. It must be noted that biomedical engineering is a very rich connotation of the discipline, medical imaging, biochemical analysis, medical materials, medical devices, therapeutic equipment and so on are in this category. I think the reasons for lagging behind are as follows.
1. Historical factors. From the industry's point of view, China's medical equipment industry started late, the accumulation of insufficient, and large-scale, high-end medical equipment is needed to continue to accumulate experience, has lost in the starting line, want to catch up, need time and sweat, as well as money. From the point of view of enterprises, Chinese enterprises do not have a long history, less technological accumulation, less accumulation of talent, resulting in low technology, low profits, in turn, leading to less investment, low technology, it is difficult to break out of this cycle. For example, CT (computed tomography imaging) technology, from the 1970s to the present, has been developed to the fifth generation, want to go directly from the third generation to the fifth generation, too difficult.
2. Backward basic research. Many large-scale high-end equipment technology, which itself is an epoch-making breakthrough. For example, the above example of CT, without the invention of computed tomography (won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 79), want to build machines, impossible. MRI, PET, etc. is also the same.
3. Hospitals are more willing to purchase imported equipment. There are a lot of Chinese people, which leads to a lot of Chinese patients, and many of those patients are already rich enough to afford higher diagnostic and treatment costs. So, from the hospital's point of view, assuming 20 million dollars to purchase a device, large hospitals can recover the cost within one or two years. And the level of medical devices in hospitals is one of the indicators of a hospital's diagnosis and treatment level, and hospitals have the motivation and ability to purchase more advanced and expensive medical devices from abroad. Objectively not conducive to the growth of domestic medical equipment companies.
4. Domestic disciplines are not reasonable. China's medical devices to implement classification management, the main legislation is the "supervision and management of medical devices regulations", the requirements of the second and third class medical devices is required to have clinical verification. However, many domestic colleges and universities with R & D technology do not have the conditions for clinical trials, and medical schools with clinical trial conditions and lack of technical strength. The two need to be combined, but the combination is prone to produce variables. The development cycle of medical devices is long, and such variables are likely to have devastating effects. And the engineering skills of doctors in the U.S. are so much better than those in China.
Probably these are the points. As for the regulatory factors, I don't know much about them, so I won't mention them. What I want to say is that it's actually a historical necessity. Because there are so many areas related to the medical device industry, it is easy to be affected by the barrel effect, especially the level of computer software design. Many domestic enterprises are now the direction of the breakthrough is first in one or two technically superior market segments to do strong
and then step by step expansion. This may be a road to go through, but there is still a long way to go from doing or even research and development of high-end large instruments.