Digital Intelligence Drives Paradigm Shift in Dental Healthcare: TK Dental Builds Competitive Differentiation through Lifecycle Management

Amid Phased Consumer Weakness and Intensifying Industry Involution, What Is the Way Forward for Dental Healthcare Service Chains?

The answer clearly lies in “building differentiated advantages.” This has indeed become the main theme of the development of China’s dental medical service industry in recent years, with major dental chain institutions actively engaging in this effort to seek breakthroughs.

Taikang Dental Group (hereinafter referred to as “Taikang Dental”), which operates more than 130 specialized dental medical service institutions across nearly 50 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, serves over 2 million patients annually. VCBeat has learned thatAs a large dental chain under Taikang Insurance Group, exploring innovative business models that integrate medical care with insurance has always been the core strategy of Taikang Dental. In the current era of digital and intelligent transformation in the dental industry, leveraging digitalization and intelligence to build differentiated service advantages has become an effective tool for its precision medicine and refined operations.

For example,Taikang Dental’s digital-intelligent construction philosophy is customer-centric, leveraging improvements in physician efficiency and capability building as key pillars to drive the parallel advancement of “standardized diagnosis and treatment” and “differentiated competitive advantages,” thereby providing patients with dental health services that are “safer, more precise, and more compassionate.”The concurrent emphasis on “digital intelligence” and “differentiation” underscores the critical role of digital intelligence in building Taikang Dental’s differentiated competitive advantages.

At the Taikang Dental 4th Anniversary Media Open Day event on April 22,Chen Honghua, Member of the Management Committee of Taikang Insurance Group and CEO of Taikang Dental; Cheng Xiaolin, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Taikang Dental; Jiang Zhenglin, CTO of Taikang Dental; and Cheng Yuhong, General Manager of the Operations Center of Taikang Dental, each shared insights on relevant topics and emphasized the significant value of digital intelligence in building Taikang Dental’s differentiated service advantages and refined management system.

Before delving into how digital intelligence empowers Taikang Dental to build differentiated service advantages, we must first clarify what these differentiated service advantages are.

In response to this question, many people familiar with Taikang Dental and even Taikang Insurance Group might blurt out one answer—“integration of dental care and insurance.” This is an innovation in Taikang Dental’s business model and its most communicable highlight, but by no means its only highlight.

In fact,In recent years, Taikang Dental has been actively adjusting its business structure, shifting from a heavy reliance on orthodontics and dental implants toward comprehensive general dentistry, or, more precisely, toward holistic oral health management across the customer’s entire life cycle.

Chen Honghua, a member of the Management Committee of Taikang Insurance Group and CEO of Taikang Dental, emphasized: “We aim to provide professional oral health solutions to customers at every life stage—from childhood through adulthood to old age. Furthermore, we are committed to delivering comprehensive, end-to-end oral health management that spans preventive care, diagnosis and treatment, and follow-up services.”

 Chen Honghua, Member of the Management Committee of Taikang Insurance Group and CEO of Taikang Dental

In this regard,Taikang Dental not only strengthens the establishment and practice of general dental care thinking within its medical team and strives to build a multidisciplinary joint treatment system, but also comprehensively promoted the intelligent upgrade of diagnosis and treatment in 2024, empowering the intelligent health management system for the full life cycle of oral care with digital and intelligent technologies.

Let us first examine the highly valued diagnosis and treatment phase. For patients seeking preliminary consultations without the need for an in-person visit, Taikang Dental offers online consultation options. For patients requiring in-person care, Taikang Dental intelligently matches them with the most suitable clinic based on their specific conditions, thereby reducing the decision-making burden on patients.

Subsequently, supported by digital and intelligent devices such as intraoral scanners and CBCT, and aided by the Taikang Dental AI-Assisted Diagnostic System and the AI Medical Record Quality Control System, patients can receive comprehensive oral health reports, personalized oral health records, and tailored treatment plans. This enables them to gain a thorough understanding of their oral health status while receiving personalized and precise diagnosis and treatment for their oral health issues.

Let us now turn our attention to the previously (relatively) overlooked stages of prevention and follow-up. Leveraging its proprietary data standards and AI algorithmic models, Taikang Dental can provide personalized recommendations for oral disease prevention knowledge and formulate customized intelligent follow-up plans based on each patient’s unique characteristics and oral health status. By integrating these with personalized treatment protocols, Taikang Dental delivers personalized, precision-based, full-lifecycle oral health management services to patients.

Furthermore,It is worth noting that in 2025, Taikang Stomatology also kept pace with the wave of large language model (LLM) development. Leveraging LLMs and a professional physician think tank, it independently developed the “AI Dentist,” which not only supports 24/7 online pre-triage and consultation but also generates personalized prevention and treatment plans based on patients’ oral health records.

Furthermore, Taikang Dental has integrated its “AI Dentist” with an online customer service system to create a 24/7 intelligent chatbot. This bot not only answers routine inquiries regarding appointment scheduling, fee schedules, and post-operative care but also provides personalized services—such as appointment reminders, follow-up visit notifications, and oral health education—tailored to patients’ historical medical records and preferences.

Undeniably, Taikang Dental’s digital and intelligent transformation is providing robust empowerment for its implementation of the concept of full-lifecycle oral health management, while also making intelligent and personalized oral health services accessible to a broader population. Furthermore, this digital and intelligent upgrade will benefit two other key stakeholders in full-lifecycle oral health management services: dentists and oral healthcare institutions.

The scarcity of high-quality dental professionals has long been a persistent challenge hindering the high-quality development of China’s oral healthcare services industry.

Taikang Dental’s digital-intelligence development strategy emphasizes “enhancing physician efficiency and capability building” as its pivotal lever. In an interview, Cheng Xiaolin, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Taikang Dental, further clarified the connotations of this approach—At this stage, the core value of applying digital intelligence lies in freeing up physicians’ energy, thereby enabling them to focus on tackling complex cases and designing personalized services.

Cheng Xiaolin, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Taikang Dental

Based on this, Taikang Dental has either developed in-house or partnered with third-party enterprises to deploy multiple products aimed at enhancing physicians’ work efficiency. Specifically, in addition to the intelligent follow-up system mentioned earlier, which reduces the time costs associated with patient communication, Taikang Dental has independently developed and launched an Intelligent Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Assistant and an Intelligent Medical Record Quality Control System.

The former can automatically collect clinical data and integrate doctor-patient communication information to generate a “draft” of structured electronic medical records (EMRs), thereby effectively improving the efficiency and standardization of medical record documentation and enhancing physicians’ work productivity. It is important to note that Jiang Zhenglin, CTO of Taikang Stomatology, emphasized that due to issues such as large language model “hallucinations” and out of reverence for the healthcare industry, all EMR “drafts” generated by intelligent EMR assistants must be confirmed by physicians before becoming valid.

Jiang Zhenglin, CTO of Taikang Dental

The latter primarily centers on the core values of “intelligent error correction, structure-guided input, and data visualization,” providing professional quality control services for medical record documentation. It is reported that the system’s built-in intelligent error-correction engine can automatically identify missing fields and contradictory descriptions in medical records. Furthermore, its integrated structured medical record templates can intelligently suggest anatomical localization terms and diagnostic/treatment codes, guiding physicians to standardize their data entry. This ensures standardized medical record documentation, laying the foundation for implementing full-lifecycle oral health management services.

Moreover, the system’s data visualization capabilities intuitively display the quality of departmental medical records and automatically generate quality inspection reports. By tracking high-frequency error types, it provides data visualization support for medical quality control and management.

“Although the empowerment of physicians by digital intelligence is currently focused mainly on improving efficiency, Cheng Xiaolin also stated, ‘Can digital intelligence enable physicians to do what they previously could not? This is a future worth looking forward to.’”

The application of digital intelligence in the operation of dental chains has a long history.Taikang Dental has also established a comprehensive digital and intelligent operational management system.

For example, by integrating digital modules such as the Financial Shared Services Platform, Dental Cloud Platform, Supply Chain System, Human Resources Platform, and Intelligent Follow-up System, Taikang Dental has established an intelligent operational management system covering personnel, equipment, consumables, and finance. This has enabled optimized medical operations, enhanced customer service, and coordinated clinic management, thereby comprehensively improving the operational efficiency of its chain institutions.

Furthermore, by leveraging its business analytics platform, Taikang Dental can conduct real-time monitoring and in-depth analysis of core metrics such as clinic revenue structure, cost distribution, and customer satisfaction. This enables precise identification of operational weaknesses, optimization of service strategies and resource allocation, and a comprehensive enhancement of both management efficiency and service quality.

Building on this foundation, Taikang Dental continues to explore the application and upgrading of digital intelligence in operational management. In 2025, Taikang Dental officially launched its barcode scanning system for the inbound and outbound management of dental consumables. This initiative effectively reduces operational costs and further strengthens compliance in consumables management, providing support for Taikang Dental’s implementation of refined management. Jiang Zhenglin, CTO of Taikang Dental, stated, “This project represents a key upgrade to Taikang Dental’s Dental Cloud System, laying a solid foundation for the company’s digital transformation and intelligent upgrading.”

It is beyond doubt that continuously deepening the strategic layout of digital and intelligent empowerment for oral healthcare services is a confirmed development plan for Taikang Dental. In the interview, Jiang Zhenglin also shared the future development direction of digitalization and intelligence from the perspective of Taikang Dental. This includes upgrades in intelligent diagnosis and image analysis, deeper application of AI-driven training, as well as the exploration and implementation of AI-based smart treatment plans and optimal solutions...

Based on this,In terms of customer service, Taikang Dental will continue to optimize the service experience through intelligent customer service and AI-powered consultations. In internal management, it will leverage precise customer profiling, dynamic knowledge bases, integrated clinical decision support systems, intelligent consumables management, and electronic medical record audits to enhance operational efficiency and standardize clinical practices. This will establish a comprehensive, efficient, precise, and intelligent dental healthcare service system, further driving full-lifecycle oral health management for customers.