The Current Dilemma of Health Care Data Sharing in China and Its Legal Responses

Promoting the circulation and sharing of health care data is not only a practical necessity for the advancement of the digital economy, but also a key to achieving the strategic goals of China's health care development. However, the sharing and utilization of China's health care data still face a series of challenges, including unclear allocation of rights and interests of data, breaches of personal privacy, misuse of personal information, and an underdeveloped collaborative mechanism. To overcome these barriers in the era of big data, firstly it is necessary to clarify the rights and interests’ allocation of health care data. Health care data involves three categories of stakeholders: patients, medical institutions, and the public. It is essential to appropriately allocate the rights and interests to health care data among patients, medical institutions, and public health management agencies. From the perspective of effectively utilizing health care data, the rights and interests of patients to their personal health care data are merely an extension of their individual rights and do not include the right to use the data in terms of resource utilization. The rights and interests to use health care data for resource utilization should be granted to medical institutions that actually own or control the health care data. For public health management agencies serving the public interest, only necessary rights and interests should be granted when meeting the needs of the public interest. Secondly, it is necessary to balance the inherent contradiction between sharing and privacy. This requires improving the means by which patients can exercise control over their personal information, establishing a tiered protection mechanism based on the type and sensitivity of health care data, and enhancing the enforcement of health care data regulations to ensure the protection of personal privacy and data security. Ensuring efficient sharing of health data, while respecting individual privacy. Lastly, strengthening the collaborative mechanism for health care data, accelerating the compilation of a health care data resource catalog, and developing universal standards for health care data. From both technical and institutional perspectives, this lays the foundation for the orderly and secure sharing of health care data.