The medicine pack and the patient's data

I am chief information officer of Shuheng Medical Supply Chain Company Limited, a fictional Chengdu-based distributor of medicines and medical consumables, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and controlled by a Sichuan provincial state-owned investment group. In 2025 we earned revenue of RMB 46.8 billion, most of it by delivering medicines to about 3,100 hospitals and 16,500 primary-care institutions across Sichuan, Chongqing, Guizhou and Yunnan. We also run 680 pharmacies, 42 of them specialist pharmacies dispensing high-cost medicines direct to patients, and we manage consumables inside 58 hospitals on their behalf.

Our margin is thin, about 7 per cent gross and under 2 per cent net, and almost everything that protects it is information: the electronic delivery note a hospital's pharmacy system accepts or rejects, the traceability code on each pack, the settlement record the medical insurance fund pays against. I came to this work from the hospital side. I spent my first seventeen years in hospital information systems, as an engineer and later director of information at a teaching hospital in Chengdu and, between those posts, implementing systems for a software vendor across the southwest. I then ran IT for a European drug maker's China business in Shanghai before joining Shuheng in 2019.

Two changes outside our control have shaped my time as CIO. Volume-based procurement cut the prices of hundreds of medicines, and with them the margin from which my budget is paid. Personal-information and data-security law made patient data, which our pharmacies and hospital services touch every day, something that must be justified before it moves. My answer to both has been the same: fewer systems, each kept in better order, and data held where the patient was treated unless there is a lawful and specific reason for it to travel.

Current focus

I am preparing a paper for our board's Strategy Committee on electronic prescriptions flowing from hospitals to our pharmacies under outpatient insurance pooling, and on the consent, retention and audit trail each prescription needs. Alongside it, we are replacing the last warehouse system inherited from an acquired distributor, so that every logistics centre scans and reports codes in exactly the same way.

Conversations I welcome

I am not seeking to leave Shuheng. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed company in a regulated, data-heavy business that does not trade with us, with my company's approval and a conflicts review, offering about twenty-five days a year. I accept a small number of speaking invitations from hospital, insurance and supply-chain audiences on traceability and health-data governance.