Paper short abstract:

Optimising management and allocation of public medical resources is a crucial way to promoting social justice. This paper shows a primary study on the performance of Medical Alliance in China, which emphasises the incorporation of healthcare system with STS knowledge and innovations.

Paper long abstract:

This track could be a sober moment to remind STS community that promoting social justice should be a duty to every STSer. What is social justice? Avoiding complex theories and arguments, one basic idea about social justice is to ensure every citizen's ownership of a healthy life; if rationality, as Hegel said, is justice, then social justice is to optimise use and allocation of social resources, especially public medical resources. This paper shows a primary study on the performance of an ongoing practice in China called Medical Alliance, which emphasises the combination of healthcare system and STS innovations such as remote diagnostics, digital individual health record, O2O healthcare services, cloud computing technologies and scientific management. The study consisted of both qualitative and quantitative analysis based on the surveys in the 10 provinces, which were implemented by China Association for Science and Technology in 2015. The main outputs include discussions on six aspects: (i) optimising equipment sharing mechanism and gaming environment between urban hospitals and rural clinics, (ii) rising budgets for greying population cares, patient-doctor relationship management, and nursing services, rather than high-tech treatment like precision medicine, (iii) leveraging platform of medicine bid to reduce poverty people's burdens of buying medicines (iv) researching on traditional Chinese medicine, (v) adjusting period design of new medicine approval and patenting, and (vi) evaluating impacts of the government top-down policy initiative, Internet+, on the development of primary care. This study could be a reference for STS scholars who are seeking various ways to social justice.