Breakthrough technological innovations have fostered the emergence of new quality productive forces in healthcare, providing robust support for optimizing the allocation of healthcare resources. This paper constructs an evaluation index system for China’s new quality productive forces in healthcare from three dimensions: new healthcare labor, new healthcare means of production, and new healthcare labor objects. Using the CRITIC-entropy weight method combined with the TOPSIS method, the study measures the level of new quality productive forces across 31 provinces in China from 2010 to 2023. The results indicate that the level of China’s new quality productive forces in healthcare decreased initially before rising to its peak in 2023. Among the dimensions, the performance of new healthcare labor was the strongest, while new healthcare labor objects performed the weakest. In terms of spatial differences, the level of new quality productive forces in healthcare is roughly same in the eastern and western regions in 2023, and it is slightly higher than that in the central and northeastern regions. Inter-group differences are the main source of differences in China’s new quality productive forces in healthcare from 2011 to 2019, but the hypervariation density being the main source of the overall disparity after 2020. Furthermore, there is absolute and conditional convergence in new quality productive forces, with the fastest convergence observed in the Northeast region and slowest in Western region. And there is no convergence. This paper provides new evidence on the temporal and spatial changes in the levels of new quality productive forces, offering important policy implications for enhancing the level and regional coordination of these forces.

Healthcare, New Quality Productive Forces, Spatial Disparities, Dynamic Evolution, Convergence