Changzhou, the 'Thirteenth Sister' of Jiangsu Super League, Takes the Lead in the Medical Imaging Data Innovation Sector
Over the past month, Jiangsu Province’s inaugural urban football league, the “Su Chao,” has swept across China. This nationwide football spectacle has drawn an average attendance of over 10,000 spectators per match, with its popularity even surpassing that of the China League One. Off the pitch, city-themed memes have driven topic views to exceed 1 billion, short-video plays to top 500 million, and live streams to attract 13.65 million online viewers.
Changzhou Team, with the highest average age and no professional players, may have earned the nickname “13th Sister,” but under the overarching theme of public entertainment, ranking is not the key concern. Changzhou Official"Commitment to Innovation", cleverly capturing traffic to become an off-field phenomenon of the “Su Chao”One of the Biggest Winners。
Strive for First, Ashamed of Second, is the city’s DNA ingrained in Changzhou’s very bones. Leveraging this advantage, Changzhou has made significant strides in multiple sectors, including new energy vehicles, photovoltaics, ultra-high voltage transmission, and smart meters.Seize the ChampionshipLeading the Nation. In the challenging field of innovation driven by big data in health and healthcare, Changzhou alsoBreaking Through with Determination, forging a “Changzhou Path” that leads the industry.
Healthcare data holds immense value, yet its exploitation is fraught with challenges: issues such as data quality, departmental silos, and security concerns are each sufficient to stifle innovation.
In April 2020, data was officially recognized as a new factor of production. How to unlock its value has become a key issue in the era of the digital economy.
Changzhou’s exploration in the field of health and medical data elements leads the country in both pace and intensity, a result of its sustained accumulation and subsequent breakthrough.In 2016, Changzhou was designated as a national center and industrial park for health and medical big data.First Batch of Pilot Cities, was awarded the title of “National Health and Medical Big Data (Eastern) Center.” Since 2019, the Municipal Health Commission has taken the lead in building the “Changzhou Smart Health Cloud,” leveraging the Eastern Center as its platform.Pioneering the Construction ofand launched the “Imaging Cloud” platform, achieving full coverage of all 111 public medical institutions in the city by the end of 2020.
Changzhou has thus becomeJiangsu's FirstA city featuring full-volume “cloud sharing” of medical imaging data and comprehensive access to the “Imaging Cloud.” This platform centrally aggregates, stores, and governs imaging data, ensuring the efficiency and quality of cross-institutional image retrieval, laying the foundation for mutual recognition of diagnostic examinations, enabling residents to say goodbye to “bulky film bags,” and empowering physicians to “confidently recognize” prior results.
Leadership Stems from BoldnessIn light of the current situation where most "Imaging Cloud" projects across China only provide "lightweight" indexing, Changzhou has chosen a path requiring immense courage: building a "big data processing factory" to serve the entire province. This approach not only ensures high-quality image retrieval but also integrates complete information with medical insurance systems, creating high-quality datasets to support clinical optimization, health management, and application development.Strengthening the Foundation. Standardized data collection, continuous governance, and diversified development are costly, yet they are the inevitable path to accumulating high-quality data; designing supporting fee structures and incentive-and-penalty mechanisms is complex, but it is key to project sustainability and motivating participation, and furthermore serves as the core support for future AI innovation. Practice has proven that this challenging pathHighly Valuable and Directionally Correct。
This approach has yielded significant results. The “Imaging Cloud” has achieved the “two reductions and one improvement”—reducing patient costs, lowering hospital expenses, and enhancing health insurance efficiency. In 2024, at the national level,Highly Recognized: In November, the National Healthcare Security Administration incorporated digital image processing and other elements into the pricing structure for radiological examinations; in December, the Big Data Center of the National Healthcare Security Administration and other entities signed a memorandum of cooperation with Changzhou, entrusting Changzhou with the mission of establishing a “Pilot Zone for Empowering High-Quality Development of Healthcare Security through Imaging Big Data.” The eight-character guideline of “piloting in one locality, replicating nationwide” has enabled Changzhou to advance on its path of explorationAccelerating to Lead。
For a city with a population of just over 4 million and no large-scale internet industry, achieving such a leading position is no small feat, vividly embodying the city’s DNA of “striving for first place.”
Changzhou’s Official Commitment Paves the Way for Leadership. The Changzhou Municipal Health Commission overrode all objections in 2019PioneerAchieving centralized aggregation and storage of hospital data, taking a critical first step that is rare in the industry. In 2021, Changzhou Big Data Management CenterDare to Be the First, spearheaded the inaugural municipal competition for innovative applications of health and medical big data, boldly opening up public data to explore new models for industry cultivation while regulatory policies were still under study. In 2023, the Changzhou Healthcare Security AdministrationPioneering the Promotion ofSupporting mechanisms for digital imaging services have been implemented, with their pilot initiatives ultimately gaining national promotion and benefiting the entire country.
Pilot initiatives have made Changzhou acutely aware that the circulation of health and medical data as a factor of production still requires refinement in its transition from policy to implementation. Much like the digital transformation of medical imaging, this endeavor involves crossing a river with no stones to feel one’s way across.
A vision emerged as the times demanded:Driving Development Through Competition, Exploring Pathways！
In 2021, Changzhou hosted the “China·Changzhou Health and Medical Data Open Innovation Application Competition,” releasing 4.5 billion records of deeply curated medical and health insurance data from the previous five years. In 2022, the competition was upgraded to a provincial-level event, held for two consecutive sessions and co-organized by multiple provincial departments.
This competition is, in essence, the future data element circulation market'sPrototype Rehearsal: Convergence and correlation of multi-source data, processing and supply, security-based classification and grading, policy configuration, and specialized support... By integrating complex mechanisms into the refinement of the tournament, Changzhou’s agile innovation and Jiangsu’s pioneering spirit are fully demonstrated. This makes it easy to understand why the “Jiangsu Super League” emerged in Jiangsu, and why the “Thirteen Sisters” on the field canSeize the Massive Traffic, Claim Top Honors in the Innovation Arena。
The upcoming "2025 Jiangsu 'Longyun Cup' Innovation Competition on Integrated Development of Public Data in Digital Health" is theVersion 3.0 Upgrade. This competition is integrated with the Jiangsu Division of the National “Data Element ×” Competition in the Medical Security Track, creating synergistic resource support.
“The ‘Data Element ×’ Competition aims to drive the development of related technology industries by selecting a batch of data element development and utilization solutions that demonstrate significant application effectiveness, strong innovativeness, and positive leading effects. Our goal isAddressing Pain Points in Industrial Ecosystem Application Development with One-Stop Services.” Li Li, head of the event operations planning team, highlighted the differences.
What is more noteworthy is that “zero-cost entrepreneurship” has truly been implemented in this competition.: All data required during the competition will be fully accessible, with comprehensive full-stack services (including computing power and data annotation) provided concurrently. Participants can access data, technical resources, and expert support free of charge. Meanwhile, Zhonglou District in Changzhou City has launched the “Wei Lian Tong” Life and Health Hub Innovation and Entrepreneurship Community Plan. Targeting the “One-Person Enterprise” (OPE) model suitable for digital healthcare, the plan offers small-scale technology funds, basic infrastructure, service support, and market channels to facilitate solo entrepreneurship in the health and medical sector.At Your Fingertips。
This is far more than a mere competition; it represents a novel pathway for translating and implementing new quality productive forces, embodying Changzhou’s deep commitment to its “Strive for First” spirit.。
By way of analogy, the “Data Element ×” Competition resembles a professional league, emphasizing competitive outcomes; whereas the Data Integration and Development Innovation Competition is akin to the “Su Chao,” placing greater emphasis on the process—perfecting the ecosystem and empowering innovation.
“‘The cost of developing digital health products from ‘0 to 1’ is extremely high,’ pointed out Li Li. ‘Computing power, large language models (LLMs), training of specialized small models, acquisition of high-quality datasets, and professional annotation all constitute significant barriers.’ The core objective of the competition is to reduce costs and enhance efficiency through one-stop services, helping participants avoid common pitfalls: expedited approval processes address data compliance; trusted data ensures quality and safety; computing resources, LLMs, and technical tools provide infrastructure support; while market channels and development funding facilitate scaling from ‘1 to 100.’”
Furthermore, the competition achieves innovative coverage across the entire value chain: it assigns four categories of labels—“Concept Validation,” “Model Verification,” “Product Market Fit,” and “Market Financing”—based on the maturity level of each entry, thereby matching participants with professional mentoring and resources. Li Li emphasized, “From idea design to validation and calibration, and finally to commercial implementation, all stages can be explored through this competition. We refine our collaborative mechanisms based on real-world needs while also responding to the diverse demands of the ecosystem.”
The competition also provides a valuable testing ground for innovation.For instance, innovative enterprises providing health data services to specific populations (such as those with cancer or obesity) often struggle with the security and quality of data collected via the internet. The competition offers access to high-standard medical and health insurance data, which, when combined with annotated data, can form high-quality “one-person-one-file” datasets, significantly enhancing commercialization efficiency in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, insurance, and health management.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Eastern Center have jointly established a collaborative innovation base to promote the commercialization of digital orthopedic products. Although the technology is mature, its commercial viability has been hindered by its limitation to single-hospital services. The competition serves as a key incubation platform, enhancing model capabilities through data augmentation (e.g., postoperative prediction) and implementing a cloud-based deployment strategy where “data remains stationary while models move.” This plug-and-play solution empowers hospitals to overcome bottlenecks in large-scale application and innovate their business models.
The digital healthcare market holds immense potential and is on the verge of an explosive boom, with health and medical data serving as the core driver; however, the threshold for innovation remains exceptionally high.
Changzhou, which has already secured a leading position in the medical big data application sector, once again embodies its urban DNA of “striving to be first.” Leveraging its profound expertise and forward-looking vision, the city has launched this Public Data Integration and Development Innovation Competition.. This is not only a valuable “testing ground,” but may also, much like its imaging cloud reform, serve as a key catalyst for advancing the factorization of medical data across China, contributing a replicable “Changzhou Model” to this challenging yet highly significant endeavor.
Stay tuned for the 2025 Jiangsu “Longyun Cup” Innovation Competition on the Integrated Development of Public Data in Digital Health,Click to Register。
References:
Changzhou Daily: “Changzhou Becomes a Pioneer Zone in Empowering High-Quality Development of Medical Insurance with Imaging Big Data: Promoting the Construction of an Integrated Imaging Cloud Data Network to Facilitate Nationwide Sharing and Mutual Recognition of Examination Results”
Changzhou Daily: “Changzhou Medical Imaging Reports Achieve Province-Wide ‘Cloud Sharing,’ Ending the Era of ‘Large Bags of Film’ for Cross-Hospital Visits”