The testimony ends with recommendations to encourage the U.S. government and businesses community to consider investing and collaborating with Chinese counterparts to foster innovations in public health and health care. For example, in the next few years, a mutually benefiting travel health certificate can reduce the barriers for travel between the two countries and mitigate the economic loss due to the disruption of travel among millions of international students and businesspeople; South Korea and China started such a program recently.

China continues to expand on its health care reform and open up for private investment and partnership for breaking new ground in remote medicine, medical robots, digitalized health management, and supplemental private insurance. Under the new trade agreement reached in January 2020, China agreed to make a number of improvements on trade secret issues and protect patents and pharmaceutical-related intellectual property. The U.S. government and businesses have criticized China for taking insufficient action to protect intellectual property in the past, but if followed in good faith, these agreements could benefit U.S.-Chinese collaboration
on business development, which, in turn, will create more opportunities for U.S. businesses to benefit from joint ventures in biomedicine and technology. COVID-19 will inevitably create a
structural break from the traditional ways of doing business and propel the applications of AI, machine learning, and smart systems to advance precision medicine. The United States and China can work together to lead the way of achieving the ultimate goals of a world-class health care system that can be efficient, easy to access, and high quality, and a global health coalition that can fight epidemics like COVID-19 more efficiently.

Testimony presented before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on May 7, 2020.

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