Concerns Mount Over Chinese Medical Tech in the NHS and Potential Data Harvesting Risks

[Social Media]

 

Experts and officials have issued stark warnings about the potential exploitation of sensitive health data from British patients by Chinese entities, raising fears that such information could be weaponized for biotechnological purposes. Concerns have intensified as Chinese medical technology companies gain an increasing foothold in Britain’s healthcare system, supplying critical equipment to hospitals and potentially accessing valuable patient data.

 

Alarm bells are ringing among MPs and security specialists over the risks posed by China’s growing role in the UK healthcare sector. The fear is that patient health information, when harvested, could be used to develop bioweapons tailored to specific populations. British hospitals, heavily reliant on advanced medical equipment, are increasingly sourcing such tools from Chinese firms, raising strategic security concerns.

 

One prominent company at the center of attention is Mindray, a Shenzhen-based firm with a UK base in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. The company has significantly expanded its operations across Europe and Britain, employing over 100 staff and securing contracts with more than 600 teaching hospitals across Europe. In the UK alone, Mindray has entered into over 50 contracts with NHS hospitals to provide vital equipment, including monitors, ventilators, anaesthesia devices, and ultrasound instruments.

 

Despite no allegations of wrongdoing against Mindray, its rapid integration into European healthcare systems has fueled apprehensions about data security. The company asserts that its diagnostic equipment operates within secure, closed hospital IT infrastructures and does not externally store patient data. However, its strong political connections and endorsement from Chinese Premier Li Qiang—who visited the company in August—have underscored the strategic importance of Mindray to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

 

The broader issue extends beyond one company. MI5 chief Ken McCallum highlighted the risk of hostile states like China exploiting emerging technologies, including synthetic biology, which involves modifying biological systems such as viruses for new functions. “The stakes are now incredibly high on emerging technologies,” McCallum stated, warning that states dominating fields like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology could wield immense power in shaping global futures.

 

Tory Shadow Foreign Minister Alicia Kearns has called for urgent safeguards to prevent British patient data from falling into adversarial hands. She emphasized the Chinese regime’s disregard for privacy, stating, “The Chinese Communist Party has no respect for privacy or individual rights. It raids personal information when it wants, and once British data reaches China, we have no way of ensuring it isn’t used for malicious purposes.”

 

Kearns underscored the strategic implications of genomic data harvesting, noting that China’s ambition to become a global biotech leader depends on accessing diverse genetic data beyond its domestic population. She added, “No country would tolerate a foreign state raiding physical copies of patient healthcare records—why should we accept the risk of our most intimate information being stolen digitally?”

 

As concerns escalate, calls for stricter regulations and vigilance in the procurement of medical technology are growing louder. The potential misuse of sensitive health data underscores the need for a robust strategy to safeguard national security while maintaining the integrity of Britain’s healthcare system.

 

Based on a report by Daily Mail 2024-12-24

 

 

 

[JimHuaHin]

Good reason to be concerned.  A recent report from the US' NBR highlights several cases of overseas Chinese nationals working in foreign educational/health institutions stealing personal genetic, health and medical data.

[The Old Bull]

What a load of rubbish. China phobia is about money this is the only way sellers  of expensive medical equipment have to oppose China's entry into the market. Huawei is another example of keeping China out of the market.

[Purdey]

I wonder why the Chinese would want patient data? Developing vaccines? Improving surgery? 

[john donson]

50 minutes ago, Purdey said:

I wonder why the Chinese would want patient data? Developing vaccines? Improving surgery? 

 

backdoor trojan ransomware maybe? pay or we deactivate your xx million per unit tool?

[thaibeachlovers]

18 hours ago, Purdey said:

I wonder why the Chinese would want patient data? Developing vaccines? Improving surgery? 

You might as well ask why large corporations want data on people.

 

The OP is what happens when greedy western companies ( and the NHS is basically a company ) and countries give away their own industries and outsource everything to China. It's all about greed.

The Bible warns about greed, and likely it will lead to the downfall of western civilisation. IMO.

[thaibeachlovers]

18 hours ago, The Old Bull said:

What a load of rubbish. China phobia is about money this is the only way sellers  of expensive medical equipment have to oppose China's entry into the market. Huawei is another example of keeping China out of the market.

You overlook the reason medical equipment is so expensive. It's because western countries are so insanely litigious, and a large part of costs of medical equipment is insurance and covering their liability when sued. Get rid of that and costs would be way less.

[MicroB]

None of the data Mindray are capturing on their devices can be used for designing "bioweapons". Its the wrong sort of data. I work in the field.

 

Currently the UK government promotes to the world the NHS, because its the world's largest single system patient database. This is an important consideration if you are looking to set up clinical trials, and want to recruit patients with a certain profile, such as age, gender, weight, ethnicity. Canda is the UK's number 1 competitor in that regard, because it also has access to a large patient database,  that like the UK, is ethnically diverse. Japan has been a difficult country to launch new drugs and medical devices, because the country requires clinical data related to a Japanese population. One outcome of that was for years, Japanese women had no access to BRCA mutation testing in Japan, vital in detecting the most common familial breast and ovarian cancers. Instead, samples were taken in Japan and sent to the US for testing by Myriad Genetics.

 

Recently, Japan has started to accept trials data that includes ethnically Japanese people, opening up Canada as a place a company could set up trials. Clinical trials are complicated things, with recruitment and retention rates varying greatly by country. The UK and Canada have very good records in this respect.

 

In recent years, China has begun to tighten up its regulation. By 2030, the Chinese government wants 90% of its healthcare needs to be provided by Chinese companies. China has a 4 tier healthcare system, if you include Traditional Medicine Hospitals (which aren't quite what you think)/ Top tier hospitals are utterly dominated by Western and Japanese brands. Bottom tier hospitals use frankly substandard Chinese products that aren't seen beyond the 3rd World. Companies like Mindray are considered top tier. Lower tier hospitals want better products, and Doctors there want the same products as Doctors in top tier hospitals. Russia has found out that you can't force doctors to buy Russian devices and medicines simply out of patriotic pride (Trump will find out this, when he discovers 70% of US medtech iis made overseas, and cannot be smply reshored). China will come up with better designs, I have no doubt. They have some very capable biomedical engineers and scientists. But they won't hit their 2030 target.

 

Where China is really good is at AI/ AI is transforming drug discovery, shaving decades off biomarker discovery. But, in medtec, its really good for gaining a competitive advantage in those areas that have become nearly commoditized, eg diagnostic imaging, blood tests, endoscopy. AI needs access to big, high quality data sets. The bigger the dataset, the more accurate the result. German companies are complaining that their government has hamstrung them by banning the movement of German patient data to outside of Germany, even to other EU states, to combine with with data sets. The EU has strict restrictions. So Germany is uncompetitive in this respect.

 

China in this area. Arguably the UK is stronger, and thats due to a combination of the business environment, but also the role of the NHS taking a lead on AI; the NHS has an arm, NHS-X (its been renamed), responsible for development of in house AI solutions (the online 111 service is AI powered), but also commercialising those solutions (eg its now selling an Ambulance logistics App and CKD patient tracker to the Gulf States, Singapore and Australia).  Training the tech using the NHS dataset is a real competitive advantage. But innovation is overcoming challenges even when that data set is not big enough. for instance, I have been talking to a company which is seeking to improve mammography outcomes. 50% of mammogram results are wrong. Either a cancer is missed, or, more commonly, cancer is mistakingly diagnosed, leading to unecessary surgery. Mammograms are typically analysed by a human. Image analysis can help, but its pretty subjective, and there have been scandals in recent years. AI can improve image analysis. But the system needs to be trained to recognise cancerous tissue. So it needs images of healthy and diseased breased. A lot of them, of exceptional quality produced by the latest 3D Tomography machines. 200 million images. There aren't enough of these images in the world. So they used AI to create the images to create a training data set. Accuracy is now 75%. Post COVID, data is the big transformation in medicine. Every pandemic has resulted in a step change in medicine. Spanish flu helped create rules for infection control. Polio, besides the Iron Lung that was literally created over night, caused the invention of Intensive Care Medicine. The 1957 Mao flu pandemic heralded the role of the path lab in fighting outbreaks. These things we take for granted now, but only came about than tkso Plato's famous maxim (often quoted, slightly wrongly, as Necessity is the Mother of Invention). Most people are aware of Fleming discovering penicillin, but not many know it was WW2 and Operation Overlord that really made it practical (and which invented the Pharmaceutical Industry, which didn't really exist before WW2).

 

I suspect the events that lead to the COVID1-9 Pandemic will eventually be traced back to events surrounding the US mortgage crisit of 2008, that caused the Global crash, and which had a profound effect on how global trade was conducted. And really because of those events, most countries are more cash strapped post Pandemic than they needed have been. All healthcare systems have struggled to catch up. Frankly, some of the problem will go away as patient die. There isn't any more money to pump into healthcare. AI and telehealth is part of the response to deal with that (do more, with less). And that will far reaching implications and benefits.

 

China might be a big country, but it has a disperate and badly organised healthcare system, with varying quality datasets. Mining UK patient data isn't a threat to the safety of the British state itself; such notions are fanciful. But it is a competitive threat, if China was able to design AI  that is more accurate for European populations. And the prize, as always, is the US. The medical industry in the US has really pushed up the cost of healthcare. The Insurance industry get a lot of stick, but companies like United are only making 6-7% margins. Thats not excessive profits.

 

The Insurers push back against claims, because there is a lot of uncessary medical care. The loon who shot the United CEO, had previously undergone very expensive spinal fusion surgery, which has dubious efficacy (rates have increased 10x in the US), probably left him in pain, with no further options except increasingly risky and ineffective further surgery. The US doesn't have anything like the UK's NICE as the gatekeeper to tell doctors what treatments and medicines are most effective (follow NICE guidelines, and you will not lose a Law Suit. Don't follow the Guidelines, it might not be wrong, but you are on your own). The Federal government hasn't done enough; the FDA for instance, gave up regulating genetic tests 40 years ago, and are now left with a monster load of tests no one knows actually work.

 

Partly to protect their shareholders, the insurance companies step in. Their one weapon is to refuse claims. US hospitals have the worst readmission rates in the West; you're more likely to go to hospital, get treated, go home, and end up back in hospital, usually dying. This is because hospitals are quick to discharge, but inadquate in following up. The Insurers are on to this, and have told hospitals don't improve readmission rates, they will cut reimbursements by 50%. As a result, hospitals are scrambling to beef up community nursing; nurses going to patients; homes to see how they are.

 

This is where AI comes in, and the sort of data that is collected on Mindray devices (Mindray will mostly be seen in Snart Beds, bedside monitors, ventilators with built in controls). The more measurements the nurse can collect, recorded on a handheld device, and fed into the Cloud, he better AI can predict outcome, and the more likely the hospital will intervene to prevent the patient going back to hospital in a worse way that before.

 

Datawise, the US is a bit like China; there is a lot of data, but its not collected very well, and is not in one place. HCUP produces a national patient procedure dataset. They present data on how many procedures are undertaken and what sort. All of that is used in strategic planning to forecast demand. Only its not real data. HCUP can only collect data from 16 States, not 50, so the number is eztrapolated.

[thaibeachlovers]

4 hours ago, MicroB said:

None of the data Mindray are capturing on their devices can be used for designing "bioweapons". Its the wrong sort of data. I work in the field.

 

Currently the UK government promotes to the world the NHS, because its the world's largest single system patient database. This is an important consideration if you are looking to set up clinical trials, and want to recruit patients with a certain profile, such as age, gender, weight, ethnicity. Canda is the UK's number 1 competitor in that regard, because it also has access to a large patient database,  that like the UK, is ethnically diverse. Japan has been a difficult country to launch new drugs and medical devices, because the country requires clinical data related to a Japanese population. One outcome of that was for years, Japanese women had no access to BRCA mutation testing in Japan, vital in detecting the most common familial breast and ovarian cancers. Instead, samples were taken in Japan and sent to the US for testing by Myriad Genetics.

 

Recently, Japan has started to accept trials data that includes ethnically Japanese people, opening up Canada as a place a company could set up trials. Clinical trials are complicated things, with recruitment and retention rates varying greatly by country. The UK and Canada have very good records in this respect.

 

In recent years, China has begun to tighten up its regulation. By 2030, the Chinese government wants 90% of its healthcare needs to be provided by Chinese companies. China has a 4 tier healthcare system, if you include Traditional Medicine Hospitals (which aren't quite what you think)/ Top tier hospitals are utterly dominated by Western and Japanese brands. Bottom tier hospitals use frankly substandard Chinese products that aren't seen beyond the 3rd World. Companies like Mindray are considered top tier. Lower tier hospitals want better products, and Doctors there want the same products as Doctors in top tier hospitals. Russia has found out that you can't force doctors to buy Russian devices and medicines simply out of patriotic pride (Trump will find out this, when he discovers 70% of US medtech iis made overseas, and cannot be smply reshored). China will come up with better designs, I have no doubt. They have some very capable biomedical engineers and scientists. But they won't hit their 2030 target.

 

Where China is really good is at AI/ AI is transforming drug discovery, shaving decades off biomarker discovery. But, in medtec, its really good for gaining a competitive advantage in those areas that have become nearly commoditized, eg diagnostic imaging, blood tests, endoscopy. AI needs access to big, high quality data sets. The bigger the dataset, the more accurate the result. German companies are complaining that their government has hamstrung them by banning the movement of German patient data to outside of Germany, even to other EU states, to combine with with data sets. The EU has strict restrictions. So Germany is uncompetitive in this respect.

 

China in this area. Arguably the UK is stronger, and thats due to a combination of the business environment, but also the role of the NHS taking a lead on AI; the NHS has an arm, NHS-X (its been renamed), responsible for development of in house AI solutions (the online 111 service is AI powered), but also commercialising those solutions (eg its now selling an Ambulance logistics App and CKD patient tracker to the Gulf States, Singapore and Australia).  Training the tech using the NHS dataset is a real competitive advantage. But innovation is overcoming challenges even when that data set is not big enough. for instance, I have been talking to a company which is seeking to improve mammography outcomes. 50% of mammogram results are wrong. Either a cancer is missed, or, more commonly, cancer is mistakingly diagnosed, leading to unecessary surgery. Mammograms are typically analysed by a human. Image analysis can help, but its pretty subjective, and there have been scandals in recent years. AI can improve image analysis. But the system needs to be trained to recognise cancerous tissue. So it needs images of healthy and diseased breased. A lot of them, of exceptional quality produced by the latest 3D Tomography machines. 200 million images. There aren't enough of these images in the world. So they used AI to create the images to create a training data set. Accuracy is now 75%. Post COVID, data is the big transformation in medicine. Every pandemic has resulted in a step change in medicine. Spanish flu helped create rules for infection control. Polio, besides the Iron Lung that was literally created over night, caused the invention of Intensive Care Medicine. The 1957 Mao flu pandemic heralded the role of the path lab in fighting outbreaks. These things we take for granted now, but only came about than tkso Plato's famous maxim (often quoted, slightly wrongly, as Necessity is the Mother of Invention). Most people are aware of Fleming discovering penicillin, but not many know it was WW2 and Operation Overlord that really made it practical (and which invented the Pharmaceutical Industry, which didn't really exist before WW2).

 

I suspect the events that lead to the COVID1-9 Pandemic will eventually be traced back to events surrounding the US mortgage crisit of 2008, that caused the Global crash, and which had a profound effect on how global trade was conducted. And really because of those events, most countries are more cash strapped post Pandemic than they needed have been. All healthcare systems have struggled to catch up. Frankly, some of the problem will go away as patient die. There isn't any more money to pump into healthcare. AI and telehealth is part of the response to deal with that (do more, with less). And that will far reaching implications and benefits.

 

China might be a big country, but it has a disperate and badly organised healthcare system, with varying quality datasets. Mining UK patient data isn't a threat to the safety of the British state itself; such notions are fanciful. But it is a competitive threat, if China was able to design AI  that is more accurate for European populations. And the prize, as always, is the US. The medical industry in the US has really pushed up the cost of healthcare. The Insurance industry get a lot of stick, but companies like United are only making 6-7% margins. Thats not excessive profits.

 

The Insurers push back against claims, because there is a lot of uncessary medical care. The loon who shot the United CEO, had previously undergone very expensive spinal fusion surgery, which has dubious efficacy (rates have increased 10x in the US), probably left him in pain, with no further options except increasingly risky and ineffective further surgery. The US doesn't have anything like the UK's NICE as the gatekeeper to tell doctors what treatments and medicines are most effective (follow NICE guidelines, and you will not lose a Law Suit. Don't follow the Guidelines, it might not be wrong, but you are on your own). The Federal government hasn't done enough; the FDA for instance, gave up regulating genetic tests 40 years ago, and are now left with a monster load of tests no one knows actually work.

 

Partly to protect their shareholders, the insurance companies step in. Their one weapon is to refuse claims. US hospitals have the worst readmission rates in the West; you're more likely to go to hospital, get treated, go home, and end up back in hospital, usually dying. This is because hospitals are quick to discharge, but inadquate in following up. The Insurers are on to this, and have told hospitals don't improve readmission rates, they will cut reimbursements by 50%. As a result, hospitals are scrambling to beef up community nursing; nurses going to patients; homes to see how they are.

 

This is where AI comes in, and the sort of data that is collected on Mindray devices (Mindray will mostly be seen in Snart Beds, bedside monitors, ventilators with built in controls). The more measurements the nurse can collect, recorded on a handheld device, and fed into the Cloud, he better AI can predict outcome, and the more likely the hospital will intervene to prevent the patient going back to hospital in a worse way that before.

 

Datawise, the US is a bit like China; there is a lot of data, but its not collected very well, and is not in one place. HCUP produces a national patient procedure dataset. They present data on how many procedures are undertaken and what sort. All of that is used in strategic planning to forecast demand. Only its not real data. HCUP can only collect data from 16 States, not 50, so the number is eztrapolated.

Interesting post with much to think about.

The takeaway I get is that so called public health services are going down the rabbit hole of high tech, when almost all of the patients I looked after in decades of nursing in public hospitals were low tech. When the bureaucrats spend most of the money on high tech that is applicable to few of the patients, it means that low tech patients have to wait. Just one heart replacement costs more than many, many simple operations such as cataracts.

Seems to me the aim is to benefit the few over the many.

 

Given the human characteristic of looking to build empires I expect more public money to be diverted into high tech with higher media profile in future, leaving patients with simple, but less "sexy" ailments to suffer longer.

 

My solution- public money should be spent for the maximum benefit for as many patients as possible. Leave the high tech for those that can afford it in a private system.

When I worked for the NHS, which was some years ago so may have changed, laser corneal shaping was done only for private ( paying ) patients. The NHS did the dog work of cataracts, simple procedures that changed countless lives for the better, but were not media worthy.

[Tropicalevo]

On 12/24/2024 at 8:13 AM, The Old Bull said:

What a load of rubbish. China phobia is about money this is the only way sellers  of expensive medical equipment have to oppose China's entry into the market. Huawei is another example of keeping China out of the market.

Wrong.

It is about Knowledge and knowledge is power.