The document said that the development of pilot smart healthcare cities should be finished by 2020.

Zhou Ming, executive vice-president of the China Council for International Investment Promotion, predicted that the smart healthcare service industry will eventually surpass even that of e-commerce.

"The smart healthy city will relieve pressure on hospitals and healthcare companies. Nowadays, healthcare equals hospitals in Chinese people's minds. In the future, hospitals might account for only 20 percent of every people's healthcare plans," she told the China Sourcing Summit.

Lin Lin, secretary general of the China Health Education Center said: "Chinese citizens still lack the sense of what smart healthcare is. Most of them still believe in government-run hospitals when they encounter health problems.

"Our governments and companies should let people know that smart healthcare services will provide them with easier and cheaper healthcare access."

The two-day summit, held in Hangzhou, discussed topics that included IT service sourcing, cross-border e-commerce tech integration and service innovation, and the smart healthcare city.

The First China Smart Healthy City Conference took place over one-and-a-half days. During the conference, solution and service providers and industrial experts discussed plans to develop smart healthcare cities in China along with ways to combine academic research with commercial marketing strategies.

what they say

"Currently, too much investment flows to medical treatment sessions. However, in a smart healthcare system, prevention and rehabilitation are more important than medical treatment. Statistics say that more than 260 million people in China are suffering from chronic diseases. If we can get more investment into the prevention sector, the number of people suffering from chronic diseases will be much smaller."

YU MENGSUN, honorary chairman of the Chinese Society of Biomedical Engineering

"It is a good thing that more companies are entering the smart healthcare service market, but integration of technology and market should not be ignored. Technology is important, but service is more important. I suggest industry players view the market as a whole, not separate sections for each of them to claim. If companies and city governments can work fruitfully together, the market will blossom."

LYU LIMING, deputy director of the Program Department of the China Association of Health Promotion and Education

China has become the most attractive market for healthcare service sourcing companies in the US, because it is the only billion-people-level market in the world. On the basis of fully understanding governmental policy, business opportunity and, most important, the demands of the Chinese people, we are going to introduce a series of world-class healthcare service companies into China."

IAN HAU, founder and chair of US-based Smart Healthy City Alliance CHINA DAILY