CHINA Law and Practice Contributed by: Alan Zhou, Charlene Huang, Jenny Chen and Stephanie Wang, Global Law Office
Many pharmaceutical companies may imple- ment data collection without realising these practices implicitly violate regulations, as they often frame inventory or patient volume track- ing as routine operational analysis rather than unlawful prescription statistics. This lack of awareness increases legal risks, as regulato- ry scrutiny focuses on the nature of data use (regardless of intent) when the information can directly or indirectly reveal prescribing patterns. Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption The laws and regulations in the PRC have con- sistently imposed strict anti-commercial brib- ery and corrupt practices measures from both administrative and criminal perspectives. In recent years, the regulators’ continuous efforts in targeting anti-bribery and anti-corruption in the healthcare sector have been seen.
In recent enforcement actions, there has been an increase in cases where pharmaceutical com- panies paying service fees to healthcare pro- fessionals through digital programmes such as patient education programmes and patient man- agement programmes. Given that the healthcare professionals implicated did not perform sub- stantive services and the payments offered by the companies exceeded the fair market value, the relevant authorities found these programmes involved irregularities in terms of commercial bribery and corruption.
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