Generative AI Enters the Health Screening Industry: MEINIAN Health Launches 'Health Xiao Mei', China's First Generative AI-Powered Digital Health Manager

Various signs indicate that the pace of generative AI implementation in healthcare is accelerating!

At the NVIDIA GTC conference held in early March, there were more than 90 sessions related to life sciences and healthcare, surpassing those in technology sectors such as hardware, semiconductors, and automotive for the first time to rank first across all industries. Meanwhile, throughout 2023, NVIDIA made aggressive investments in the primary market—among the 13 projects involving medical AI, the vast majority focused on generative AI.

Correspondingly, CHINC 2024, held in late March, has become the medical exhibition with the highest “concentration” of generative AI in China to date—nearly every scenario within medical workflows that could benefit from improved quality and efficiency has been reimagined using generative AI, and an increasing number of generative AI applications are moving from expanded use cases into the implementation phase.

Major healthcare giants in China are also actively embracing this trend. They not only dedicate significant space in their annual reports to outlining the planning and application of generative AI, but collaboration among them has also become a prevailing trend. In particular, some early-stage partnerships have progressively reached the stage of implementation and deployment.

As early as late January, Meinian Onehealth, Huawei, and Runda Medical announced a partnership to jointly develop China’s first generative AI-powered digital health manager—“Health Xiaomei.” On April 15, it launched its internal trial run, marking the acceleration of the physical examination industry into the era of generative AI.

Commercial health checkups have a relatively short history in China. Prior to the 21st century, most domestic health examinations were mandatory, government-mandated screenings designed to assess whether individuals’ physical conditions met the requirements for specific job positions. With the rise in socioeconomic standards and growing public health awareness, health examinations have gradually shifted toward preventive, commercially driven health checkups, primarily aimed at the early detection and treatment of potential diseases.

Once this substantial demand was unleashed, it immediately spurred rapid growth in the health checkup industry. According to data disclosed in Meinian Onehealth’s annual report, the number of health checkups performed in China surged from 230 million in 2009 to 549 million in 2021. Nevertheless, the industry’s penetration rate stands at only 38.9%, lagging significantly behind developed countries with higher health checkup coverage rates, such as the United States (74.2%), Japan (73.4%), and Germany (96.6%).

From another perspective, this significant gap also creates substantial room for growth. It is estimated that the market size of health checkups in China increased from RMB 46.8 billion to RMB 189 billion between 2012 and 2021, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.78%. The market size is projected to reach RMB 390 billion by 2025.

Driven by both market forces and policy support, private health checkup institutions have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. Among them, Meinian Onehealth has emerged as a latecomer that surpassed its predecessors, overcoming numerous challenges along the way, and officially listed on China’s A-share market in July 2015, becoming a leading enterprise in the health checkup industry. As of the end of June 2023, Meinian Onehealth operates four major brands: “Meinian Grand Health,” “Ciming Health Checkup,” “Ciming Aoya,” and “Meizhao Health.” Its 608 health checkup centers cover more than 30 provincial-level administrative regions across China, ranking first in the industry in terms of the number of covered cities, outlets, and annual health checkup visits.

However, despite the rapid growth of private health checkup institutions over the past decade, public medical institutions—particularly public Grade A tertiary hospitals—continue to dominate the health checkup market, leveraging their robust medical service capabilities and strong brand appeal. To remain competitive, private health checkup providers must make greater efforts by investing in both technology and services.

In recent years, AI has begun to capture the attention of business leaders. Yu Rong, Chairman of Meinian Onehealth, stated, “AI can significantly enhance the efficiency, stability, and quality of professional health examinations. Its application in the health checkup industry can improve screening accuracy, enhance customer experience, boost operational efficiency, reduce costs, and facilitate the rapid improvement of clinicians’ capabilities, thereby driving innovation and development in health examination and health management services.”

Leveraging AI to revolutionize health checkups and drive innovation and development in health examination and health management services has become an industry-wide consensus. As a leader in China’s preventive healthcare sector, Meinian Onehealth was among the earliest to explore the empowerment of its entire workflow with cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

Yu Rong introduced to VCBeat Meinian Onehealth’s explorations in AI in recent years: “Since 2017, Meinian has launched a series of ‘specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative’ products integrated with AI technologies, including AI for pulmonary nodules, cardiovascular health, fundus examination, ultrasound, and brain health, all of which have contributed to revenue growth. As a leading enterprise in preventive medicine, we have undertaken bold innovations and practices in AI-based health screening products and closed-loop services over the past two years, empowering health screening scenarios with AI and making AI benefits accessible in routine health examinations. Currently, AI applications at Meinian Onehealth have become widespread. The launch of these products has not only significantly enhanced the precision and efficiency of health screenings but also delivered an unprecedented experience for examinees.”

These practices have yielded favorable outcomes, and the industry is increasingly optimistic about the application and implementation of AI in preventive medicine, particularly in the field of health checkups. On one hand, AI applications can facilitate precise screening, enhance screening accuracy, reduce human error, improve customer experience, and boost customer satisfaction. On the other hand, AI helps further improve the efficiency of disease screening and expert image interpretation, while reducing costs. Furthermore, the high-quality health big data generated from health checkup volumes will continue to optimize and empower AI algorithms, unlocking more application scenarios in specialized fields.

Empowered by AI, the health checkup industry is ushering in a new era, evolving from Health Checkup 1.0 (routine screening) and Health Checkup 2.0 (in-depth screening) to Health Checkup 3.0 (comprehensive, full-cycle health management), and now advancing into Health Checkup 4.0 (personalized, digital-intelligent health management), embarking on a journey toward vast and promising horizons.

It is widely believed that AI holds immense potential to completely revolutionize the entire workflow of the health checkup industry—spanning pre-examination, intra-examination, diagnosis, post-examination, and management—by optimizing costs, efficiency, and user experience.

Yu Rong introduced to VCBeat Meinian Onehealth’s explorations in these processes: “Currently, we have fully implemented the application of AI and big data across the pre-examination, intra-examination, and post-examination stages. For instance, in the pre-examination phase, we provide professional and targeted check-up plans through intelligent add-on recommendations and smart customization of personal health screening packages. During the examination phase, AI technologies are extensively applied, whether for medical assistance, innovative products, or enhancing customer experience through time-slot appointment scheduling. In the post-examination phase, intelligent chief physician reviews and AI-enabled Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) expert consultations for health assessment can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of diagnosis and treatment, while also providing a robust data foundation for health interventions and personalized health management plans for users. Finally, in the health intervention stage, building upon services such as access to medical care, expert referrals, and insurance products, we are gradually exploring AI- and big data-assisted solutions tailored to the management of various chronic diseases.”

“Furthermore, since 2022, we have been providing personalized health checkup services driven by AI algorithmic models. Both individual and corporate clients can leverage AI to customize their health checkup packages based on historical data and brief questionnaires. We are also researching the use of AI and large language models for intelligent comprehensive examination reporting. This will usher the health checkup industry into the ‘Checkup 4.0’ era, characterized by personalized, digital-intelligent health management,” he added.

With the widespread adoption of AI, Meinian Onehealth is also committed to further leveraging large model technologies to deeply unlock the value of health big data and capitalize on its data advantages. “Health Xiao Mei” represents an attempt to productize this strategy.

As China’s first AI-powered health management robot, this device can generate personalized health management plans with a single click after users upload information such as personal lifestyle habits and historical exercise data. It can also establish continuous and comprehensive digital health records based on individual health data, lifestyle habits, and family medical history, thereby generating exclusive check-up and preventive care protocols. Furthermore, it can create a digital twin based on user-provided data to simulate the user’s health status in real-life scenarios, enabling early detection of potential health issues and providing corresponding solutions.

In layman's terms, Health Xiaomei acts as a private health consultant available 24/7, continuously providing users with personalized health advice and intelligent service solutions.

Health management is a “blue ocean” market with immense potential. According to forecasts by iResearch, the size of China’s health management market reached RMB 1.8107 trillion in 2023 and is expected to exceed RMB 3 trillion by 2028, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% from 2023 to 2028. It is widely believed that the expansion of health assistant products, services, and ecosystems, combined with the rapid advancement of generative AI, is driving explosive growth in this sector. Over the next three years, this trend is projected to create business growth opportunities worth at least tens of billions of yuan.

This is also one of the reasons why health management assistants are currently becoming a trend. At the recent NVIDIA GTC, Hippocratic AI’s generative AI-based health assistant was extensively discussed. Meanwhile, the WHO has just released its own generative AI health assistant—S.A.R.A.H.

However, compared with them, the large language model behind Health Xiaomei is fine-tuned based on Huawei’s Pangu Large Model and built upon high-quality, professional health examination data from domestic checkup users accumulated by Meinian Onehealth over the years, making it more specifically tailored to the Chinese market.

More importantly, Health Xiaomei can integrate with Meinian Onehealth’s actual business operations to incorporate multimodal data—such as electronic medical records, genetic information, and imaging data—in the future, thereby providing users with more comprehensive disease assessments and diagnostic recommendations.

Leveraging this capability, Health Xiaomei can integrate with wearables, non-invasive diagnostic technologies, and digital therapeutics to further mine and utilize multidimensional, real-time health data, thereby providing users with more effective health management tools.

According to Meinian Onehealth, “Health Xiaomei” is not merely a conceptual product; instead, it will be rapidly deployed across all of its affiliated health examination centers in the near term, providing users with personalized, diversified, intelligent, and lean whole-lifecycle health management services.

“In the future, we will leverage digitalization and AI to achieve intelligent, end-to-end operational management of health examinations, with comprehensive coverage of artificial intelligence and large models in key areas such as intelligent final review, intelligent laboratory testing, ultrasound robots, and health management robots,” said Yu Rong.

“Providing users with full-lifecycle health management services” is easier said than done. Meinian Onehealth’s digital transformation, implemented in recent years, marked the beginning of this journey. The company had long been laying the groundwork for digital transformation and, in 2022, unveiled its strategic goal of “Building a New Meinian in Three Years.” Going “All-in on Digitalization” became the key move to achieve this strategic objective.

By deepening its digital operations and actively promoting the digital upgrade of medical information systems, Meinian Onehealth aims to build a full-lifecycle digital health management system that spans the pre-examination, intra-examination, and post-examination stages. This initiative seeks to achieve comprehensive digitization across all business areas and processes, from customer visits and order initiation to clinical departments, laboratory testing, medical imaging, final review, customer service, and health management.

In 2022, Meinian Onehealth officially launched its long-in-development, self-developed Bianque Intelligent Health Examination Management SaaS Cloud Platform. The platform was subsequently rolled out across its branches nationwide in 2023, achieving standardization of medical data, normalization of medical processes, and remote management of medical quality. This has ensured the consistency and continuity of healthcare quality while significantly improving operational efficiency and customer experience.

This is regarded as marking the dawn of a new era for Meinian Onehealth’s next-generation smart health examination cloud platform, signaling that the digitalization and intelligent management of its entire health examination process are being accelerated.

On the fourth floor of Meinian Onehealth’s headquarters, a large screen displays real-time information from all its clinics across China. At the same time, data from the 700 low-dose CT scanners distributed nationwide are clearly visible—showing in detail how many patients each CT unit scanned on that day, the duration of each examination, and even the specific radiation dose per patient.

The data is underpinned by the Bianque System.

Meanwhile, Meinian Onehealth fully deployed its Laboratory Information System (LIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) in 2023. Through these two systems, the headquarters can monitor quality control status across various locations in real time and establish a comprehensive quality control framework for imaging reports. The customer health examination process has also been fully digitized and intelligentized, significantly enhancing service efficiency and customer experience.

The successful accumulation of this digital transformation has given Meinian Onehealth sufficient confidence, laying the foundation for its further strategic deployment in medical AI. At the beginning of 2024, Meinian Onehealth upgraded its “All-in-Digital” strategy to an “All-in-AI” strategy, setting the goal of evolving from a leading enterprise in the preventive healthcare sector to a pioneer in comprehensive, full-lifecycle digital and intelligent health management.

In Meinian Onehealth’s “All-in-AI” strategy, Health Xiaomei will play a pivotal role in bridging the past and the future.

First, Health Xiaomei will serve as a natural traffic entry point. According to data from the National Health Commission of China, health literacy among Chinese residents is rapidly improving. Coupled with the growing population of individuals with chronic diseases and the aging demographic, the potential user base for health management services via Health Xiaomei is estimated at approximately 400 million. The platform has the potential to increase its market penetration rate year by year, while also converting and scaling up the existing volume of medical check-ups through personalized health management solutions.

Secondly, the immense potential of Health Xiaomei in value-added services is evident to the naked eye. Over the years, Meinian Onehealth has accumulated a customer base for health checkups numbering in the hundreds of millions, with a significant proportion of individuals willing to pay for personalized and intelligent health management services. Given Meinian Onehealth’s vast customer scale, even a 10% increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) would generate substantial additional income.

Moreover, the precise and personalized services provided by Health Xiaomei can effectively enhance customer stickiness, increase repurchase and referral rates, and indirectly boost revenue. Given Meinian Onehealth’s market position and brand influence, this growth potential should not be overlooked.

Finally, from the perspective of the entire healthcare ecosystem, Health Xiaomei’s backend integrates services such as remote image interpretation, specialized care management systems, expedited medical access channels, health insurance innovation, and customized nutritional supplement services. Coupled with an innovative ecosystem of future services and products—such as smart wearable devices and digital therapeutics—the industry scale it can leverage may reach the hundred-billion-yuan level.

From a long-term strategic perspective, generative AI health assistants similar to Health Xiaomei will help the health checkup industry improve its full-lifecycle health management service platform and build a more comprehensive health management ecosystem. With the assistance of generative AI, health checkup institutions will be able to develop more customized services and products based on customer needs, while extending collaboration and services within the ecosystem.

After several years of rapid development, medical AI has entered its second phase, with competition in commercialization capabilities becoming increasingly critical. Unfortunately, due to various constraints, it is not easy for AI-driven healthcare solutions to achieve breakthrough progress in public medical institutions in the short term. In contrast, commercial health checkups, which rely primarily on out-of-pocket payments, have emerged as a viable channel for the commercial deployment of AI.

Meinian Health has always been an active practitioner of AI commercialization. On one hand, it accelerates the incubation of early-stage AI startups through entrepreneurial competitions. Since 2017, Meinian Health has hosted five editions of the China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition’s specialized track for integration among large, medium, and small enterprises, focusing on intelligent precision medicine, proactive health and digital healthcare, AIGC in healthcare, and other related fields, cumulatively serving more than 1,300 companies and teams.

On the other hand, Meinian Onehealth is also proactively and deliberately developing AI-based health checkup programs to facilitate their early implementation and application.

As early as 2017, Meinian Onehealth pioneered the launch of AI-assisted diagnosis for pulmonary nodules, facilitating the practical implementation of AI technology for pulmonary nodules, which was still in its infancy at the time. In 2022, this product was iterated into a comprehensive lung health service called “Feijiening,” becoming the first in the industry to achieve closed-loop management for the entire monitoring process of pulmonary nodules.

In 2022, Meinian Onehealth launched “Nao Rui Jia,” a specialized brain health service product. As China’s first innovative product focused on early screening for stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, it has established the company’s leadership position in brain health screening for the general population. Featuring technology pioneered in China, the product innovatively combines MRI scans, assessment scales, AI, and genetic testing, making it the first in the industry to enable early risk assessment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Currently, Meinian Onehealth has successively launched a range of innovative health screening products featuring AI, covering AI-assisted diagnosis of pulmonary nodules, stroke, cognitive disorders, coronary arteries, electrocardiograms (ECG), and breast ultrasound; AI-based quality control for ultrasound; AI-assisted fundus examination; and AI-based assessment of bone age in children, thereby accelerating the commercialization of these AI technologies.

As time has progressed, Meinian Onehealth is no longer content with merely promoting the commercial implementation of AI. How to leverage its vast accumulation of high-quality data to empower AI has become a key challenge facing the company—one example of its exploration in this area is leading the National Key R&D Program’s special project on the “Cloud Platform for Big Data in Health Checkups.”

During project implementation, Meinian Onehealth leveraged its strengths to efficiently collect and govern 130 million health examination records, including five-year longitudinal data for 4.34 million individuals and genetic test results linked to 1.88 million individuals, thereby establishing a robust foundation of data resources.

Given this capability for data mining and utilization, the current collaboration between Meinian Onehealth, Huawei, and Runda Medical is a natural progression.

In this collaboration, Meinian Onehealth will provide massive, precise, and high-quality big data from health examinations. This will be combined with Huawei Cloud’s leading technologies in cloud computing, big data, and the Pangu large model, as well as Runda Medical’s extensive industry experience in smart healthcare services. The three parties complement each other, aiming to deliver more intelligent, comprehensive solutions for the health examination industry.

The role of Meinian Onehealth as a co-builder of the AI terminal ecosystem has been further clarified through this collaboration, and its “All-in-AI” strategy is poised to yield substantial results in the future. “I believe that through extensive cross-industry collaboration and synergistic innovation, and by fully leveraging digital technologies and precision data-driven services, we can accelerate the development of the technological foundation and industrial ecosystem for smart health management, striving to create a leading domestic benchmark platform for ‘AI + Health Management.’” Yu Rong expressed strong optimism about the future of the “All-in-AI” strategy.

This is not the end of the story. In early 2024, the National Data Administration released the Three-Year Action Plan for “Data Element ×,” which lists healthcare as a key focus area. The initiative aims to unlock the potential of data elements and systematically release the value of personal health and medical data.

Meinian Onehealth, established 20 years ago, provides annual health check-ups to approximately 30 million individuals. Since its listing, it has cumulatively served around 230 million person-times, becoming China’s largest personal health data center. It has built a vast repository of health data encompassing sociodemographics, medical history, lifestyle, physical examinations, laboratory tests, and imaging studies. These data hold significant importance not only for the AI ecosystem but also will generate substantial value in the upcoming era of “data as a factor of production.”

References:

Zheng Luan, "Business World": "Yu Rong: Professionalism Achieves Meinian's Long-Termism"

Li Xiuzhi, "China Entrepreneur": "A Brief History of Private Health Checkups"