It is one of the priorities of the new round of healthcare reform to develop regional healthcare alliances through vertically integrating resources. This paper reviews the framework and characteristics of Shanghai’s healthcare system, and then analyzes its strengths and weaknesses, underscoring Shanghai’s exploration in the vertical integration of medical resources as a response to the pressing issues in healthcare. The paper outlines the main tasks and groundwork of the Shanghai healthcare alliance initiative and gives an outlook on the expected outcomes. It ends with some thoughts on the problems and challenges confronting regional healthcare alliances in Shanghai.
The health status, health needs and demands as well as the concept of health itself have changes dramatically in the last one hundred years, the organizational and institutional evolutions of health system took place accordingly. To adapt the changes of health system, medical education has experienced three generations of major reform in the last century: the science-based curricula, problem-based instruction, system-based and competence-oriented education. At the same time the organization of medical education evolved from academic medicine to academic health center to academic health system. This article briefly describes the process of this evolution and presents author’s personal views on academic health system.