Serving as a key platform for unlocking the value of medical insurance data resources. Medical insurance data is vital to people's livelihoods, touching every household. Fully activating the potential of this data and breaking down barriers between healthcare, medical treatment, and pharmaceuticals can empower various scenarios, including early disease screening, medication safety assurance, and cross-regional medical settlement.
To activate the value of medical insurance data, the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) and local governments will co-host several competitions in 2026, including the National Smart Healthcare Competition, the Medical Imaging AI Image Recognition Competition, the Medical Simulation Mannequin and Health Sensor Intelligent Perception Competition, and the Global Brain-Computer Interface × Healthcare Innovation Scenario Competition, forming a "1+3" smart healthcare competition matrix.
Focusing on pain points and difficulties in the healthcare sector, the National Smart Healthcare Competition has been held for three consecutive years. This year, it is co-hosted by the NHSA and the Beijing Municipal People's Government. At the promotional event for the 2026 National Smart Healthcare Competition and its series of events held on August 17, it was learned that 1,293 teams registered for this year's competition. The preliminary round concluded on July 26, and after expert review, 240 teams were selected to advance to the finals.
"Diverse and high-quality data supply" is a major feature of this year's competition. Wang Mingshan, Party Secretary and Director of the Beijing Municipal Healthcare Security Bureau, introduced that the competition integrates desensitized medical insurance data from eight regions, including Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei. It also adds high-value medical data from dozens of Beijing hospitals, such as disease-specific imaging and electronic medical records, as well as public data from six industries, including education and civil affairs. This restores real medical insurance business scenarios and provides support for algorithm model training and validation.
The Global Brain-Computer Interface × Healthcare Innovation Scenario Competition, co-hosted by the NHSA and the Zhejiang Provincial People's Government, is dedicated to promoting the deep integration of cutting-edge brain-computer interface (BCI) technology with innovative healthcare scenarios, creating an innovative ecosystem empowered by BCI in healthcare. China's BCI industry is currently in a critical stage of accelerated technological iteration, expanding scenarios, and continuous ecosystem improvement. This competition leverages healthcare demand to guide, policies to direct, and resources to coordinate, supporting quality projects through a full-chain system, providing backing for clinically valuable and compliant results, and expanding the coverage of technology applications.
Zhang Yi, Party Secretary and Director of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Healthcare Security Bureau, also introduced the status of the National Medical Imaging AI Image Recognition Competition at the event. This is the country's first national-level professional competition in "AI + medical imaging recognition," with its preliminary round launched on August 1.
"Adhering to the principle of promoting application through competition" is one of the highlights of the event. Zhang Yi stated that the goal is to drive AI technology to serve real scenarios and solve practical problems. "In terms of track design, we focus on real clinical needs and select eight common disease types with high incidence and heavy disease burden as competition tracks, including lung cancer, breast cancer, and thyroid cancer, covering cutting-edge directions such as chest X-rays and lesion recognition."
In terms of data support, the competition has built a high-quality medical imaging dataset of 95,000 cases, selected imaging data from thousands of difficult cases, implemented three-level quality control review, completed data annotation to high standards, and the dataset has already been put into use in the competition. All this data has been anonymized and processed according to standards.
As the first national-level professional competition in medical simulation and health sensing, the 2026 National Medical Simulation Mannequin and Health Sensor Intelligent Perception Competition, co-hosted by the NHSA and the Hunan Provincial People's Government, aims to implement the national digital economy and "AI+" development strategies, gather innovative achievements, build a new ecosystem of "three-medicine" linkage driven by healthcare, and drive the large-scale development of advantageous industries in the three medical fields. The finals were completed from July 2 to 29, and the awards ceremony will be held on August 23.
Zhang Mianchang, Party Secretary and Director of the Hunan Provincial Healthcare Security Bureau, stated that the participating projects this time feature high technical content, with multiple innovative achievements filling gaps in the domestic medical simulation mannequin and health sensor fields. In the medical simulation mannequin track, technologies such as physiology-driven simulation AI large models and digital twins address shortcomings in traditional medical staff training. Examples include super-critical care simulation training systems and wireless critical care comprehensive simulation mannequins. In the health sensor track, projects solve the problems of complex operation and limited application scenarios of traditional medical monitoring equipment, such as new products supporting 24-hour home blood glucose and blood pressure monitoring, and smart health wristbands that can continuously monitor vital signs like blood pressure and heart rate.