Digital healthcare fosters innovation – Chinadaily.com.cn | So Good News

Trends appear in areas such as surgery and treatment of chronic diseases

China’s digital healthcare industry, which has been developing for many years, is experiencing many new trends and adopting new types of high-quality innovations.

Digital health care — medical services provided with the help of digital technologies — includes remote consultations, internet hospitals and smart health care.

WeDoctor, a digital health company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, also showcased its latest achievements during the 2022 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit in Wuzhen, East China’s Zhejiang Province.

In 2015, before the opening of the second WIC, WeDoctor launched China’s first Internet hospital, Wuzhen Internet Hospital in Tongxiang, Zhejiang. The hospital has enabled online follow-up visits, digital health record sharing and online diagnostics and prescriptions at scale, the company said.

By September, the company offered digital healthcare services through partnerships with nearly 8,000 brick-and-mortar hospitals across the country. The platform had 300,000 registered doctors and 33 online hospitals, of which 19 developed ways to cover patients with public health insurance with their services.

“China’s medical reform has made great strides in the past 10 years, and digital healthcare is an important factor. China’s new medical reforms, which emphasize digitalization, are a model for the whole world,” said founder Liao Jieyuan. , Chairman and CEO of WeDoctor.

The company also launched a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) in Tianjin in 2020. The organization serves as a cloud-based platform that collects information from 266 lower level hospitals in the city. HMOs implement digital, intensive and standardized management of patient health information, particularly those with chronic conditions, WeDoctor officials said.

As of September, 76.68 percent of diabetes patients enrolled in WeDoctor chronic disease management followed the platform’s standardized management process. For three months, those who participated in the chronic disease treatment had 13.5 percent better blood glucose control than those who did not participate, the company said.

“Digital technologies provide us with excellent tools to manage chronic diseases, which require constant efforts inside and outside the hospital,” said Ji Linong, head of the Department of Endocrinology at Peking University People’s Hospital.

Kang Lei, responsible for diabetes care in Sanofi Greater China, said: “The emergence of digital health offers new answers to the treatment of chronic diseases. China’s health care industry has shifted from a basic model of people going to hospitals for treatment to a model that offers treatment to many health services in different scenarios.” The company is based in Paris and is an international is a unit of the healthcare company Sanofi SA.

“With the help of digital healthcare, medical resources across the country are expected to be balanced and China’s overall medical service level will be improved,” Kang said.

Beijing Anzhen Hospital of Capital Medical University displayed a surgical data collection robot at its booth at the 2022 China International Service Trade Fair in Beijing in September.

The robot can track and record surgical images in real-time, compile the information and transmit it remotely over a 5G network. In addition, it can connect to medical equipment in the operating room and take pictures in real time. Currently in use at Beijing Anzhen Hospital, it is expected to be widely used in the country.