Abstract
In the early 2000s, amid the difficulties facing the overall medical and healthcare industry, the chaotic situation in the pharmaceutical distribution chain triggered the government to centralize drug procurement on the national level, based on electronic biddings systems. To put this policy in perspective, China’s pharmaceutical distribution system has gone through four stages of dramatic changes, dating back to the planned economy era. In this chapter, we give a brief account of the history of China’s pharmaceutical distribution industry including the precedents of its emerging information infrastructure in order to provide the context for our data analysis.
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Reimers, K., Guo, X., Li, M., Xie, B., Zhang, T. (2014). Historical Context and Precedents. In: Innovating in a Learning Community. SpringerBriefs in Digital Spaces. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05098-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05098-0_3
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-05097-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-05098-0
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