Does construction of the digital health infrastructure promote innovation of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies: evidence from China’s pilot project of the National Healthcare Data Center

Yao Yao and Lindu Zhao

Applied Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 32, issue 11, 1546-1552

Abstract: To promote the application and development of healthcare data, China has conducted a pilot project of the National Healthcare Data Center. By treating the pilot project as a quasi-natural experiment and employing a staggered DID model, this paper provides causal evidence that this pilot project for digital health infrastructure has a positive effect on the innovation of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, which is mainly reflected in an increase in applications and citations for invention patents. The effect can also be correlated with the increase in R&D intensity, R&D efficiency and collaborative R&D. The mechanism analysis shows that from the perspective of resource utilization, digital health infrastructures affect corporate innovation in at least three ways, i.e. alleviating the resource misallocation, increasing the resource slack and using external resources.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2024.2308566

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