Background of Establishment

West China, covered by plateaus, hills and mountains, is famous for its complex geographical environment and. It has 12 provinces, autonomous regions & direct-controlled municipalities, and almost 900 counties (cities & districts) with land accounting for 71.5% land area of China. The special geological environment determines that most people, especially the rural population in underdeveloped area, still use railway and highway as main transportation. Comparatively, the western area of China has a total population of about 380 million, accounting for 29% of the national gross population. Sichuan Province has a population of 81.402 million by 2014, ranking the first in Western China. Also Sichuan has 21 over-one-million-population counties.

However, high-quality medical resources mainly concentrate in large & medium-sized cities and there are great gaps of medical care quality for hospitals at different levels. Inadequacy and unbalanced distribution of medical resources, especially the shortage of continuing medical education and medical experts, are the major pressures for grass-roots hospitals. Therefore, improving medical treating and diagnostic techniques of all levels of hospitals, cutting patients’ medical expenses while enjoying higher-quality medical services have been the urgent needs for decades. The Telemedicine Center of WCH was designed exactly for this mission.