For the residents of Dachen Island, located 29 nautical miles east of Taizhou City in east China's Zhejiang Province, seeking medical care at urban hospitals historically meant undertaking a two-hour journey by boat. Today, meeting healthcare needs on the island has become significantly more convenient.

Local authorities have coordinated specialists from provincial, municipal and district-level medical institutions to conduct regular free clinics, village outreach visits and door-to-door consultations. Traveling in mobile medical vehicles, teams of physicians bring diagnostic and treatment services directly to residents with limited mobility.

The transformation on the island offers a snapshot of a broader, structured national effort. According to China's National Health Commission (NHC), the country's average life expectancy reached 79.25 years in 2025, an increase of 1.32 years from 2020. With basic medical insurance coverage remaining above 95%, China had expanded its healthcare system to 1.1 million medical and healthcare institutions and 16 million healthcare workers by the end of 2025, enabling more than 90% of the population to reach their nearest medical facility within 15 minutes.

Optimizing grassroots care and community services

The foundational tier of China's healthcare network is undergoing a structural transformation. In 2025, primary-level medical institutions handled 52.6% of all clinical diagnoses and treatments nationwide, marking five consecutive years of growth, according to NHC data. By waiving tuition and subsidizing living expenses, the government has trained tens of thousands of physicians who are contractually obligated to serve in rural and underserved areas, fundamentally strengthening grassroots healthcare capacity.

The clinical scope of these local facilities is also expanding beyond basic treatment. In June 2026, the NHC issued a circular outlining plans to ensure comprehensive coverage of community health service centers in established urban subdistricts by 2030. The plan specifically calls for expanding specialized services, including pediatrics, dentistry, mental healthcare and hemodialysis, while promoting the use of artificial intelligence to support clinical decision-making.

The integration of advanced resources is already visible at the community level. This month, over 30 specialists and professors from top-tier institutions in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, conducted a joint clinic providing dental and vision screenings for local youth. Senior specialists are now slated to maintain regular hours at the facility, establishing high-precision digital diagnosis directly within local neighborhoods.

Furthermore, medical security is expanding early-stage support for families. The government provides a total child-rearing subsidy of 10,800 yuan (around $1,587) for eligible families with infants born after January 1, 2022. This financial support is distributed in annual installments of 3,600 yuan (about $529) until the child reaches age three, anchoring a broader national push to upgrade public nursery and toddler care services. To date, approximately 33 million families have received this financial support alongside an expanding network of public nursery slots.

Bridging the digital divide via the Cloud

In the past, cross-province medical consultations involved patients carrying physical radiology films across regional hospital networks, a practice that frequently resulted in redundant testing.

To address these inefficiencies, the government has accelerated the development of cloud platforms aggregating personal healthcare and medical insurance data. This platform relies on a unified national information architecture to assign a traceable electronic identity to medical scans, allowing physicians to securely view a patient's raw, high-resolution radiology data across provincial lines.

As of March 12, 2026, 31 provincial-level regions and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps have initiated provincial-level data uploads, accumulating over 349 million imaging indexes on the cloud, data from China's National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) shows.

Under the guidelines of China's 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), which emphasizes the application of digital and intelligent technologies in assisted diagnosis and health management, the system is scheduled to achieve nationwide integration by the end of 2027.

Expanding account pooling to ease family medical burdens

Maintaining fiscal balance while enhancing user accessibility remains a priority for the national medical insurance fund, which has seen a cumulative expenditure of 17.78 trillion yuan (about $2.61 trillion) since 2019, growing at an average annual rate of 6.81%, according to the NHSA. To better support an increasingly mobile demographic, China's NHSA and the Ministry of Finance formalized regulations in June 2026 to standardize shared access to employee personal insurance accounts across provincial regions.

Through the unified national medical insurance platform, employees can set up virtual "medical wallets" to allocate surplus individual insurance balances to close relatives – including spouses, parents, children, siblings and grandparents – living in different provinces. This mechanism allows a tech worker in Shanghai, for instance, to cover the outpatient expenses or pharmaceutical costs of their retired parents living in another province.

"This update directly addresses the urgent demand among migrant workers and families for cross-province insurance sharing," Wang Fang, an official from the NHSA told China Media Group (CMG).

"By expanding the pool of eligible relatives, the policy directly reduces the medical cost burden on families. To make the benefit accessible, the administration has streamlined the setup into a simple online process where users confirm their relationship through a formal accuracy commitment, removing administrative red tape."

Wang Zongfan, head of the healthcare security research department at the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security, explained that it is important to recognize that these personal medical insurance accounts belong to individual policyholders, who retain full discretion over how their funds are used.

"Unlike public pooled funds which are managed collectively by the state, these are private allocations. While the resulting fund migrations between provinces can be highly complex, the primary objective for local governments is to provide robust public services that help citizens activate these accounts, leveraging family networks to strengthen mutual aid across regional borders."