DHC Launches iHeart Platform Leveraging National Big Data Expertise to Advance Cardiovascular AI Solutions

Recently, led by the Chinese Cardiovascular Health Alliance and in collaboration with Sanofi (China) Investment Co., Ltd. and Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd., the three parties jointly launched the iHeart Project, an initiative for the construction of a cardiovascular informatics research platform and the optimization of clinical decision support systems.

According to the latest data released in the “Summary of the Report on Cardiovascular Diseases in China 2017,” in recent years, both the prevalence and mortality rates of cardiovascular diseases in China have been rising year by year. The number of patients with cardiovascular diseases has reached as high as 290 million, and deaths from cardiovascular diseases account for more than 40% of all disease-related deaths among residents, ranking first. It has become a major public health and social issue that affects the health status of Chinese residents and hinders socioeconomic development.

Big Data and Cloud Computing Bring Development Opportunities to the Healthcare Industry

In August 2016, at the National Conference on Health and Wellness, President Xi Jinping emphasized that “without universal health, there can be no comprehensive well-off society,” and stressed the need to prioritize public health as a strategic development priority. In October of the same year, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Outline of the “Healthy China 2030” Plan. The Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China first proposed advancing the construction of a Healthy China, elevating “Healthy China” to a national strategy. In 2018, Document No. 26 issued by the State Council put forward opinions on “Internet Plus Healthcare Services.” Several policy documents have fully demonstrated that the nation has incorporated the development and application of healthcare big data into the “Healthy China 2030” plan. These documents set forth specific requirements for the attributes and development strategies of healthcare big data, while also outlining the path and direction for the healthcare industry to leverage healthcare big data as a key tool to properly and effectively advance the process of medical reform.

The “iHeart” project was launched in response to emerging needs, aiming to elevate the overall standard of cardiovascular care in China and serve the “Healthy China” initiative.

Recently, led by the Chinese Cardiovascular Health Alliance and in collaboration with Sanofi (China) Investment Co., Ltd. and Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd., the three parties jointly launched the iHeart Project, which focuses on building a cardiovascular informatics research platform and optimizing clinical decision support systems. By establishing a clinical medical information analysis platform at pilot hospitals and constructing a clinical decision support system based on existing authoritative guidelines and consensus, the project aims to enhance physicians’ ability to provide standardized clinical care and to improve post-discharge follow-up management for patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). It seeks to promote the standardization of ACS clinical treatment and long-term follow-up management across hospitals at all levels, thereby achieving a qualitative improvement in medical efficiency and diagnostic and therapeutic standards in the cardiovascular field, including in clinical practice, medical quality supervision, scientific research analysis, and personalized treatment.

As the contractor for the iHeart Project, Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Digital Health") will achieve three construction objectives: first, the establishment of a scientific research platform; second, the development of a clinical decision support system; and third, the construction of a follow-up system.

Leveraging National-Level Project Experience to Build a Cardiovascular Clinical Research Platform and Integrate Front-End Medical Data

The primary initiative of the newly launched “iHeart” project is to build a clinical research platform that integrates and shares clinical information related to cardiovascular diseases, thereby promoting cross-disciplinary and cross-industry data fusion and collaborative innovation. The project contractors are both “veterans” in the field of medical big data: Sanofi (China) and Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd. According to Huo Yong, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Cardiovascular Health Alliance and affiliated with Peking University First Hospital, the rationale for selecting these two enterprises lies in Sanofi’s strong background as a globally renowned pharmaceutical and healthcare company, while Digital Health China possesses specialized R&D capabilities and extensive experience in implementing multiple national-level clinical medical data centers. Digital Health China has undertaken numerous national-level projects, including the construction of the National Cancer Big Data Project and several big data medical processing and application projects under the National 863 Program. Furthermore, Digital Health China places significant emphasis on data privacy and security, strictly requiring all employees involved in national medical data construction projects to complete HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) training and certification.In terms of specific implementation steps, the first step is data acquisition and transformation: knowledge content is extracted from the clinical experience of in-house experts and literature sources; data are uniformly processed through a data governance engine with quality control measures applied throughout, and then aggregated into the Clinical Big Data Center. The second step involves encrypting and de-identifying the data within the Big Data Center, mapping them to standard terminologies such as SNOMED-CT and ICD-10, and applying natural language processing techniques to construct terminology and knowledge bases. Finally, the data are stored in the OMOP Common Data Model (CDM), enabling multi-scenario and multi-center applications on a research analytics platform.

Learning from Precedents, Striving to Surpass: Medical AI Is at Its Prime

The concept of “Artificial Intelligence” was first proposed at the inaugural AI workshop held at Dartmouth College in the United States in 1956, marking the birth of the discipline of artificial intelligence. Healthcare is one of the earliest fields where AI found practical application, with initial explorations dating back to the 1970s and the development of AAPHelp by the University of Leeds. The use of medical AI for clinical decision support and assisted diagnosis began with the MYCIN system developed at Stanford University in the 1970s, which helped physicians diagnose blood infections and recommend appropriate antibiotic treatments.

To date, the applications of medical AI have expanded into multiple areas, including assisted diagnosis, medical image recognition, drug development, health management, and gene sequencing. Overall, however, medical AI started relatively late in China, and most early explorations were unsuccessful; nevertheless, efforts to advance the field have never ceased. Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd., positioning itself as a “promoter of healthcare big data and artificial intelligence,” firmly believes that AI will drive transformation in the healthcare industry. Shi Wenzhao, CEO of Digital Health China, stated that previous explorations in medical AI—whether overly ambitious in scope or smaller-scale projects—can provide valuable lessons for later entrants, enabling them to better integrate data analytics with AI-driven deep learning.

Digital Health China will actively explore the application of artificial intelligence technologies, leveraging AI to interpret clinical diagnosis and treatment records through terminology, judgment, and logic. More importantly, it aims to develop models based on this interpretation to assist physicians in diagnosis, thereby standardizing diagnostic models and enhancing the reliability of diagnostic outcomes. This effort will comprehensively promote the application of these technologies in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), facilitating advancements in cardiovascular treatment. To fully empower the cardiovascular field with artificial intelligence,Three core data-related issues need to be addressed: First, promoting inter-hospital data interoperability during the data collection phase; second, achieving high-throughput phenotyping of clinical data; and third, enabling efficient computation, rapid analysis, and integration with clinical phenotypic data to facilitate large-scale omics data analysis.

The iHeart Project Launches — The Future Is Here, Joining Hands to Welcome a New Era in the Development of Cardiovascular Care in China

To ensure the quality of platform development, the iHeart project will establish an information analysis platform for data analytics and clinical research in the cardiology departments of 30 pilot hospitals across China, build a knowledge-driven Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), deploy a lightweight version of the cardiovascular CDSS in more than 400 hospitals, and provide professional services to over 20,000 healthcare professionals and more than 3 million patients with cardiovascular diseases.

Regarding the inference engine, the project will primarily construct a cardiovascular decision support rule engine by computationally formalizing clinical guidelines and other relevant medical experiential knowledge, and will build a large-scale library of clinical decision support methods using machine learning algorithms and statistical analysis techniques. In terms of the human-computer interaction interface, the system will mainly provide physicians with various decision support services, including intelligent assessment, intelligent form completion, automatic risk alerts, order reminders, and treatment plan recommendations, as well as medical quality control. Furthermore, in alignment with the actual clinical decision-making scenarios in cardiovascular departments, it will deliver multi-modal decision support services such as reminders, warnings, and recommendations.

According to Mr. Shi Wenzhao, CEO of Digital Health China Technologies Co., Ltd., the task breakdown and responsibility allocation for the “iHeart” project have been completed through the concerted efforts of the Digital Health China project team, the Chinese Cardiovascular Health Alliance, and Sanofi. The “iHeart” project will also involve follow-up management for acute coronary syndrome (ACS), helping physicians improve long-term standardized diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up documentation by updating the app’s follow-up features, thereby continuously enhancing clinical outcome management for ACS patients. Currently, Digital Health China, Philips, and the Cardiovascular Health Alliance are advancing a cardiovascular big data monitoring project, which further complements and strengthens the follow-up management infrastructure for acute coronary syndrome.

The Future Is Here: Let Us Embrace the New Era of Cardiovascular Development in China Together with the iHeart Project!