Preparing Your Medical Records for Care in China

Our directory of hospitals in China shows each hospital’s international unit and the booking phone numbers the hospitals publish. Have the documents below ready before you write or call.

A hospital can only tell you whether it may be able to help if it understands your situation. Ask your current doctor which documents matter for your case, and ask the hospital which languages it accepts and whether translations must be certified. We have not found a national Chinese rule on translating foreign records, so this is set hospital by hospital.

Since 2022, Chinese hospitals recognise each other's test and imaging results when they meet national quality conditions; qualifying results carry an "HR" mark. Doctors may still repeat a test in defined situations — for example when your condition has changed — and must explain why.

The rules cover Chinese medical institutions and say nothing about results from abroad, so bring full reports and image files and expect that some tests may be repeated. National targets extend recognition further: by 2030, common results are to be shared and recognised across regions and institutions.

China is moving imaging onto the cloud. Since November 2024, the national medical insurance pricing rules include digital image processing, upload and cloud storage in the price of a radiology exam, and patients can get their images free on their phones. By December 2025, 27 provinces had deployed the national medical-insurance imaging cloud; a doctor can view your images once you authorise it.

These systems are built around Chinese medical insurance. Ask your hospital how you, as an international patient, can download your images before you leave.

The more we know about your medical needs, the better we can help. Tell us your diagnosis or symptoms, the treatment so far and what you hope for through Find Medical Care: it lets us match you with the right hospital and doctor, and lets the doctor judge in advance whether they can provide the care you need. When a hospital needs reports or images, we arrange with you how to send them. Leave out identifiers you do not need to share, such as national ID or insurance numbers, and keep medical details out of email subject lines.

China's Personal Information Protection Law, in force since 1 November 2021, classes medical and health information as sensitive personal information. Processing it needs your separate consent. Sending it abroad needs your separate consent too, after you have been told who will receive it and why. Your home country's privacy law may also apply.

Chinese law gives patients the right to view and copy their records: outpatient records, the admission record, temperature charts, doctors' orders, laboratory reports, imaging, consent forms, surgery and anaesthesia records, pathology, nursing records and the record of medical costs. The hospital must provide the copying service and stamp the copies, and may charge only a cost fee whose scale is published. If a record is not yet complete, the finished parts can be copied first.

Hospitals must also provide copies of electronic records, on paper or electronically; those able to may copy image files and procedure videos as well. Ask for an English discharge summary — we have not found a national rule requiring one.

National rules do not set a turnaround time, so hospitals set their own. The three Beijing hospitals below take applications online and send copies by courier, which helps if you have already flown home and someone applies for you.