Smart medical care is frequently listed in local government work reports, and "digital doctors" may become key promoters

At the beginning of the New Year, the "two sessions" are approaching, and the 2022 government work reports in various places have been released one after another. Among them, "smart medical" has become a key word that has appeared repeatedly.

Taking Beijing Municipality as an example, its 2022 government work report proposes to further strengthen the "dual engine" of a new generation of information technology, medicine and health, promote new breakthroughs in "card neck" technology in artificial intelligence and other fields, take the construction of smart medical care as a demonstration, and carry out digital community construction as a pilot to vigorously improve the level of urban service management; the Sichuan Provincial Government Work Report also proposes to cultivate new formats of digital applications and create digital application scenarios such as smart medical care and smart health care.

Smart medical care aims to solve the problem of medical supply side such as the scarcity of high-quality medical resources and the uneven allocation of medical resources. However, the long training cycle of medical talents also means that the industry must rely on digitalization to bring new driving forces. In this context, the trend of "digital doctors" spawned by the development of the Internet and artificial intelligence technology has emerged.

The "digital doctor" solution brought about by the gradual maturity of medical AI provides new ideas for the reform of the medical supply side, which is expected to solve the problem of insufficient and unbalanced supply of medical resources, greatly improve the efficiency and experience of the whole process of medical treatment, and make the general public no longer "difficult to see a doctor".

Medical imaging is the starting point, and the "digital doctor" has exploded

Data is the key to digitalization and intelligence of medical care. According to the data, medical imaging data accounts for more than 80% of all clinical data, and the imaging department is also the busiest department in the hospital system. The saturated workload of existing doctors directly affects the efficiency of traditional imaging examination and diagnosis.

Taking cardiac CTA imaging diagnosis as an example, according to the process of "scanning - post-processing - diagnosis - first writing report - report review", it takes at least 30 minutes to 1 hour to complete the imaging data reading and report completion of a patient, while the patient needs to wait 1-3 days to obtain the report. The use of AI imaging products can achieve the whole process of appointment, examination and report collection within one day, which is greatly reduced in time and the patient experience is improved.

Empowering with artificial intelligence technology and using digital technology to quickly process a large number of patient data in the diagnosis and treatment process is the first stage of "digital doctor". "Digital doctors" can assist human doctors to greatly increase diagnostic efficiency, shorten working hours, and improve the quality of diagnosis and treatment.

From 2021 onwards, medical AI companies have entered the harvest period, and Shukun Technology, which covers a wider range of application scenarios with "digital doctor" products, has revealed to the public the huge market opportunities for medical AI. According to the prospectus data, the year-on-year growth rate of Shukun Technology in the first half of 2021 was as high as 680.9% to 52.624 million yuan, which has more than doubled the total revenue in 2020. The year-on-year increase in revenue in 2020 reached 3142.3%.

Judging from the disclosure of the prospectus, Shukun Technology has laid out a total of 37 products of "digital doctor product portfolio" for key parts of the heart, brain, chest, abdomen, muscle and bone diseases, which are widely welcomed by clinicians and have been fully implemented in the top three hospitals and grass-roots hospitals in the country, becoming an indispensable helper to alleviate the current contradiction between medical supply and demand.

As a new species, medical AI companies start from the soft experience, and Siemens, Philips, GE and other large manufacturers in hardware research and development investment is the same, all in order to empower the new era of smart medical care, which may be the common vision of the medical industry.

The policy has been designed at the top level, or it may become a breakthrough in the reform of the medical supply side

Liu Shiyuan, chairman of the Radiology Branch of the Chinese Medical Association and director of the Imaging Department of Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, said in a speech at the "2020 World Artificial Intelligence Conference" that the use of AI products by front-line doctors has become normalized, and some of the more mature products have been trusted or even relied on by doctors.

Artificial intelligence "digital doctors" assist human doctors to provide patients with more efficient, more accurate, more consistent and more accessible medical services, and after several years of development, they have gradually moved from dreams to reality.

In the longer term, "digital doctors" may be the key to healthcare supply-side reform.

In addition to the shortage of total high-quality medical resources, there is still a significant gap between urban and rural scissors in medical supply and demand. In the "2020 China Hospital Rankings" released by the Institute of Hospital Management of Fudan University, in the list of top 100 hospitals, 23 in Beijing, 19 in Shanghai, and 9 in Guangzhou, the three cities occupy half of the top 100 hospitals in China.

According to data from the National Health Commission, as of the end of March 2021, there were 35,394 hospitals in the mainland, of which 2,996 were tertiary hospitals, accounting for only 8.46%; however, the number of visits to tertiary hospitals was as high as 179,824.5, accounting for 54.12% of the total number of visits in the country. The high concentration of patients has not only led to a shortage of patients in grass-roots hospitals and a relative lack of rural supply, but also reduced the efficiency of hospital diagnosis and treatment in mainland china, according to the Frost & Sullivan report data, Chinese patients spend an average of 3 hours for outpatient visits, while the actual time for diagnosis is only 8 minutes. At the same time, the phenomenon of "difficulty in registering" and "difficulty in seeing a doctor" in large cities has gradually emerged.

After the gradual maturity of medical AI technology, "digital doctors" can not only help human doctors greatly improve diagnostic efficiency, but also effectively improve the level of diagnosis and treatment in areas with backward medical resources.

On December 28, 2021, the "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Medical Equipment Industry" jointly issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Health Commission and other 10 departments also listed diagnostic and testing equipment as one of the seven key development equipment areas, and clearly mentioned "the development of a new generation of medical imaging equipment, to promote intelligent, remote, miniaturized, rapid, precise, multi-modal integration, diagnosis and treatment integration." ”

Similarly, in the two major policy documents issued in early 2021, the "Opinions on Promoting the High-quality Development of Public Hospitals" and the "Key Tasks for Deepening the Reform of the Medical and Health System in 2021", the construction of smart hospitals and the construction of hospital information standardization were clearly mentioned.

In terms of top-level design, the "Made in China 2025" document released in 2015 also placed AI in a high position to reshape the key components of the national economy and industrial production capacity; in 2017, the State Council issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan", which set AI as an important national strategy and called for the application of AI in the urgent needs involving improving people's livelihood (including medical treatment); in 2018, the National Health Commission issued the "National Health and Medical Big Data Standards, Security and Service Management Measures". Relevant cybersecurity requirements, definitions and regulatory rules have been put forward for the collection, processing and storage of medical big data in China, and the 14th Five-Year Plan emphasizes the importance of smart healthcare, medical Internet of Things and smart medical devices.

At the specific operational level, in 2021, the approval of artificial intelligence medical devices led by the State Food and Drug Administration will be fully accelerated, and the domestic leaders Lianying and Shukun Technology will win a number of NMPA three-class certificates, and the supervision and standardization of artificial intelligence medical software will continue to improve.

At present, thanks to the continuous exploration of head enterprises, the concept of "digital doctor" has gradually expanded from the first stage of imaging digital doctors to clinical digital doctors, health digital doctors, etc. Digital doctors have become one of the synonyms of medical AI and entered people's daily lives.

It is foreseeable that in the next few years, the development of medical AI will continue to be supported by strong policies from top to bottom. Driven by the dual market and policies, the outbreak of "digital doctors" is also reasonable, in the near future, "digital doctors" may be able to fundamentally improve the problem of "difficult to see a doctor", and become the key promoter of the realization of medical supply-side reform and smart medical vision.