AI ambulances and robot doctors: China seeks to ease hospital strain...
AI ambulances and robot doctors: China seeks digital
salve to ease hospital strain
In the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, an ambulance
speeds through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped along by an artificial
intelligence (AI) system and big data.
A woman touches a screen on a robot developed by iFlytek
at the outpatient hall of People's Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing,
China March 16, 2017. Zhao Naiming/Qianlong.com via REUTERS
28 Jun 2018 09:16PM
HANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI: In the eastern Chinese city of
Hangzhou, an ambulance speeds through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped
along by an artificial intelligence (AI) system and big data.
The system, which involves sending information to a centralized
computer linked to the city's transport networks, is part of a trial by Alibaba
Group Holding Ltd. The Chinese tech giant is hoping to use its cloud and data
systems to tackle issues hobbling China's healthcare system like snarled city
traffic, long patient queues and a lack of doctors.
Alibaba's push into healthcare reflects a wider trend in
China, where technology firms are racing to shake up a creaking state-run
health sector and take a slice of spending that McKinsey & Co estimates
will hit US$1 trillion by 2020.
Tencent-backed WeDoctor, which offers online
consultations and doctor appointments, raised US$500 million in May at a
valuation of US$5.5 billion. Ping An Good Doctor, a similar platform backed by
Ping An Insurance, raised US$1.1 billion in an IPO this year.
"The opportunity is growing very fast," said
Min Wanli, the Hangzhou-based chief machine intelligence scientist at Alibaba's
cloud division.
Alibaba is working with a hospital in Shanghai using data
to predict patient demand and allocate doctors. In Zhejiang province, the
company is working on AI-assisted diagnosis tools to help analyze medical
images such as CT scans and MRIs.
"You need to go through very specialized training in
order to read these images, but we know that experts are a very scarce
resource," said Min.
Chinese hospitals are increasingly using technology to
bridge the gap between urban centers and remote parts of the country where
doctors are in short supply. Using document-sharing systems and livestreaming
video, specialists can direct more junior medical staff on-site doing patient
diagnoses.
DXY, one of China's biggest online networks of doctors,
offers consultations on the WeChat social media platform for patients with
chronic diseases such as diabetes, with a team of nurses and doctors providing
medical advice.
China is pressing to reduce healthcare costs that are
soaring as the population ages, putting huge strains on the state insurance
system.
At the same time, Beijing has been promising better
access to healthcare and improved grass-roots care - despite a lack of family
doctors - which has brought technology into the spotlight as a way of
maximizing stretched resources.
"Educating doctors is going to take too long,"
said Rogier Janssens, Beijing-based general manager of Germany's Merck KGaA's
biopharma business in China. He added that smartphones could help deliver
primary care faster and cheaper.
"There are hundreds of millions of people who still
go without care for relatively simple diseases."
China's healthcare system has long grappled with a
shortage of doctors, exacerbated by low wages and a dearth of local clinics and
general practitioners. That means patients often crowd into large, specialist
hospitals for even minor ailments.
Beijing has been trying to fix the problem, setting
targets to increase the number of family doctors across the country.
However, the government has been slow to embrace
technology within the healthcare system, held back by the challenge of
digitalizing a sprawling, fragmented hospital system still dominated by public
hospitals and state-run firms.
ONLINE DRUG SALES
The policy winds may be starting to change. Beijing has
enacted legislation over the last two years that has included strong support
for internet-based basic healthcare services.
Premier Li Keqiang said this year that healthcare tech
could "help alleviate the problem of inaccessible and expensive public
health services that have long been a big concern".
Now, Beijing may be about approve the sale of some
prescription drugs online, creating a major opportunity for local and global
firms, according to companies in the sector.
Janssens of Merck KGaA said the company had "good
indications" that policymakers were addressing the issue of pharmaceutical
e-commerce "as we speak".
Li Tiantian, the founder and chairman of DXY, said the
health ministry had met with healthcare companies like his own and planned to
soon release a policy on "internet hospitals", which would open up
some online sales.
"I think the new policy will be released very soon,
potentially in July," he said.
The policy would allow approved hospitals to consult,
prescribe and sell drugs to chronic disease patients online. However,
regulatory concerns over safety and pushback from state-run distributors sank a
similar plan several years ago.
Li added that Ningxia autonomous region, in north-central
China, had already been approving some internet hospital providers on a test
basis.
Global drugmakers are taking notice. A move to open up
online sales - if approved nationwide - would help shake up a drug market
dominated by state-owned distributors and public hospitals, where most
medicines are still prescribed and sold.
Merck KGaA, for example, recently announced a tie-up with
Alibaba Health focused on systems to help track medicines to avoid
counterfeiting, but also on online drug sales and potential direct-to-patient
sales online.
FALSE HOPE?
In the United States, technology firms like Amazon,
Google and Apple have made pushes into healthcare, with mixed results, often
finding sprawling medical markets tougher to crack than entertainment or media.
Technology firms in China also face major obstacles.
One is convincing patients to see doctors online or
getting hospitals to spend extra money on high-tech tools that promise
efficiency boosts or improvements for patients. And regulators still have
concerns about drug sales online.
Doctors and industry insiders also said that technology
alone could not solve the issues facing the sector.
"Technology is important but is not enough on its
own," said DXY's Li, a former doctor. He said the most immediate benefit
was creating new channels for simple primary care.
Wang Aihu, a cardiologist at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital,
said medical centers were increasingly using online appointment and payment
systems, and that he conducted internet consultations for patients in remote
regions.
He added that his hospital may eventually have
"AI-powered medical imaging systems or robot doctors", but these could
not replace medical staff.
"These promising technologies will help accelerate
and improve diagnoses, but will not replace good doctors, who are still needed
to verify and correct diagnostic results," he said.
That hasn't stopped one hospital in Beijing doing a
"man vs machine" standoff this month to detect neurological disorders
including brain tumors. A robot developed by the prestigious Tsinghua
University and iFlytek, a local firm, has also taken and passed China's medical
exam for doctors.
For most people in China, however, AI ambulances and
robot doctors may need to wait a bit longer.
Tony Li, 55, a cancer patient in Shanghai, said he had
seen little cutting-edge tech in Chinese hospitals in regular visits over the
past few years.
"From what I heard, some of the newest technologies
can help doctors identify tumors at earlier stages, and that's great," he
said. "But the internet has a tendency of exaggerating things, giving us
enormous false hope."
Alibaba Cloud's Min acknowledged the company was still
working to prove the value of its technology, and that many hospital
administrators were still suspicious of things like cloud computing.
But, he said, "In China, once a new technology is
proven useful then everybody is crazy about it."
(Reporting by Adam Jourdan; Additional reporting by
Shanghai newsroom; Editing by Philip McClellan)
Source: Reuters
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