WeDoctor Equips Health Community with AI-Powered Engine to Drive Grassroots Healthcare Transformation

“Implemented a ‘voting with feet’ mechanism, under which 230,000 patients enrolled in the special outpatient program for diabetes voluntarily signed up and selected their health management institutions, achieving a patient satisfaction rate of 97%. The average monthly medical expenditure per patient in this program decreased from RMB 1,643 to RMB 1,255, representing a 23.6% reduction, while the medical insurance surplus rate reached 23.3%.”

——Recently, media platforms affiliated with the National Healthcare Security Administration featured a special report on Tianjin’s reform experience in implementing “capitation-based global budgeting for diabetes care and enforcing the health stewardship responsibility of medical institutions.” Tianjin’s approach to enhancing primary healthcare services and governance capabilities through the Digital Health Community has garnered widespread attention, with the “Tianjin Model” emerging as a national demonstration benchmark for advancing the construction and upgrading of tightly integrated medical consortia.

Figure | The reform experience of the “Tianjin Model” has been promoted at the national level on multiple occasions

Since the release of the “Document No. 41” by ten ministries and commissions, which mandated the comprehensive rollout of tight-knit county-level medical consortia on a provincial basis by the end of June 2024, the development of such consortia has been included in the “list of key tasks” by provinces and municipalities across China. While local governments and healthcare reform departments are deploying strategies for establishing tight-knit medical consortia, they face the more pressing practical challenge of ensuring their effective operation. Achieving high-quality development through synergy between medical consortium construction and industrial collaboration, thereby maximizing return on investment, tests the relevant authorities’ determination to pursue innovative reforms and their capacity to integrate advantageous resources.

This is not the first time that the “Tianjin Model” has been promoted at the national level. In 2020 and 2023, Tianjin was repeatedly featured among the “Top Ten New Measures for Advancing Healthcare Reform and Serving Public Health” nationwide, thanks to its innovative practices such as the “Four Clouds” platform of the Digital Health Community and the implementation of capitated global budgeting for family doctor contract services. Key innovative experiences explored by the Digital Health Community—including “empowering primary care with digital and intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence,” “capitated global budgeting for family doctor contract services,” “encouraging and guiding social healthcare institutions to join medical consortia,” and “allowing retained surpluses from basic medical insurance funds”—have been affirmed and recognized by national competent authorities and have been fully integrated into guiding policies for industry development, thereby being promoted across China.

Back in 2020, the Tianjin Municipal People’s Government and Weiyi formally signed the “Strategic Cooperation Agreement on Digital Health,” thereby initiating Tianjin’s path to breaking new ground in healthcare reform through digital intelligence. Under the guidance of the Tianjin Municipal Health Commission and the Tianjin Municipal Healthcare Security Administration, Tianjin Weiyi General Hospital (Tianjin Weiyi Internet Hospital) took the lead in collaborating with 266 primary healthcare institutions across the city to establish a tightly integrated digital medical consortium—the Tianjin Digital Health Community—jointly exploring an integrated healthcare service system centered on health.

As a product of systemic and institutional reforms as well as industrial innovation, the Tianjin Digital Health Community has achieved a top-down “major breakthrough” in healthcare reform. Leveraging WeDoctor’s years of accumulated and refined MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) capabilities, it has uniformly built four cloud platforms—cloud management, cloud services, cloud pharmacy, and cloud diagnostics—across primary healthcare institutions throughout the city. It has deployed intelligent disease-specific diagnosis and treatment systems based on general artificial intelligence technologies and expert consensus, and promoted the implementation of capitated global budget payment under medical insurance and the health stewardship responsibility system for special outpatient diabetes care. In doing so, it has formed a close-knit community of shared responsibilities, values, and interests with 266 primary healthcare institutions in Tianjin.

MaaS is a novel AI-driven business model that delivers personalized services to multi-platform users through an AI-powered digital intelligence platform. WeDoctor’s MaaS has become the underlying “operating system” for initiatives such as the Digital Health Community in the AI era. It evolved from the large-scale application of AI capabilities across online and offline healthcare scenarios, including WeDoctor Smart Hospitals and Health Communities, continuously driving the upgrading and efficiency enhancement of the healthcare service system.

The adaptive adjustment and innovation of production relations to align with productive forces have yielded phased results. According to public reports, over the three years since the establishment of the Tianjin Digital Health Community, operational effectiveness has been significant, achieving the healthcare reform goal of “two increases and one decrease”: First, population health indicators improved, with the glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) compliance rate among more than 100,000 managed outpatients with special chronic diseases (diabetes) increasing by 33.66%. Second, primary healthcare service capacity was enhanced, leading to a 23%–50% increase in outpatient visits at primary medical institutions. Third, the growth rate of medical insurance expenditures was reduced; in 2023, capitation-based management of outpatients with special chronic diseases (diabetes) generated cumulative medical insurance fund savings exceeding RMB 231 million, with an average savings rate of over 20%.

Figure | Tianjin Healthcare Consortium Leverages AI Applications to Achieve Multi-Party Benefits for Diabetes Patients, Hospitals, and the Government

The report “Digital Transformation and Governance Reform,” published by Beijing Normal University Press, pointed out that the Digital Health Community is not only a new form of close-knit medical consortium with Tianjin characteristics but also a new model for reshaping primary healthcare service systems through digitalization. It provides digital governance approaches and experiential references for effectively addressing challenges in primary health governance, such as inadequate multi-stakeholder cooperation and win-win mechanisms, insufficient efficient coordination among medical care, health insurance, and pharmaceutical services (the “three medicals”), limited primary care service capacity, and imperfect physician incentive mechanisms. In practice, the Digital Health Community model has become one of the benchmarks for upgrading close-knit medical consortia and medical communities across various regions, accelerating the transformation of primary healthcare service governance.

Currently, artificial intelligence has become a strategic technology leading the future, serving as the core driving force behind a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and acting as the primary arena for developing new quality productive forces. The research, development, and implementation of AI in the healthcare sector have also entered an accelerated phase, with its most significant application scenario lying within the vast grassroots-level healthcare system.

Under the comprehensive empowerment and in-depth support of WeDoctor’s MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) model, artificial intelligence technologies have achieved large-scale application within the Tianjin Digital Health Community. By leveraging AI to build a digital-intelligent hub encompassing five core capabilities—medical care, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, health management, and administration—the initiative has delivered remarkable results in enhancing the service capacity of primary healthcare institutions, strengthening tiered diagnosis and treatment, providing full-lifecycle health management for the public, and reshaping medical service processes, delivery models, and management frameworks.

In *The Power of Evolution*, Liu Run mentions that all significant future opportunities are hidden in the word “productivity.” It can be said that comprehensively improving “productivity” and reducing human “error rates” are undoubtedly the primary issues that AI technology must address.

Since 2021, WeDoctor has been progressively upgrading its internet hospital into a “Smart Hospital.” Powered by AI as the foundational driver, it has established five core centers: the Digital-Intelligence Medical Center, Digital-Intelligence Pharmaceutical Center, Digital-Intelligence Cloud Inspection Center, Digital-Intelligence Health Management Center, and Digital-Intelligence Regulatory Center. These efforts have culminated in a systematic product matrix of digital-intelligence medical consortiums, achieving comprehensive research, development, and application of AI-driven solutions for specialized disease diagnosis and treatment, health management, medical examinations, pharmaceutical services, and regulatory oversight.

According to statistics, the AI-powered health management application developed by WeDoctor has increased the individual efficiency of health managers by 150%; AI pharmaceutical services have reduced labor costs for prescription review by 31%, while improving the rationality and cost-effectiveness of medication use to over 98%; the adoption of specialized AI diagnostic and treatment systems, along with AI-assisted examinations, has improved the quality of primary care treatment plans by 22% and increased the annual screening rate for related tests at the primary care level by 28%; furthermore, digital intelligence-based regulatory functions have enhanced medical insurance compliance by 9.6%.

Figure | Five Digital-Intelligence Capabilities for Building a Digital Health Consortium

As healthcare reform continues to advance toward the goal of being “health-centric,” AI technology is driving “disruptive” changes across the upstream and downstream industrial ecosystem—opening up broader AI tracks for medical services, pharmaceuticals, and health insurance. For instance, medical services are shifting from traditional disease treatment to whole-lifecycle health management, spurring greater demand for intelligent products. Meanwhile, aided by artificial intelligence, pharmaceutical companies’ new drug R&D will benefit from superior real-world data and scenario support.

WeDoctor, a pioneer in driving industry breakthroughs and development, has long transcended the traditional “Internet healthcare” business model. By proactively deploying MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) infrastructure, it has strategically invested in the “Healthcare + AI” sector for many years. From initially connecting hospitals and patients through its Guahao.com platform, to pioneering Internet hospitals that link doctors, patients, and pharmaceuticals, and further to upgrading to “Smart Hospitals” and creating the Digital Healthcare Community model, WeDoctor has successfully integrated technological capabilities, application scenarios, and commercialization. This has achieved scalable monetization and secured a first-mover advantage in the competitive medical AI market.

Notably, leveraging its professional technical capabilities and disciplinary resources, WeDoctor’s medical AI capabilities and products adhere to the pathway of “originating from application scenarios and returning to them,” thereby closely aligning with practical application needs. It is understood that WeDoctor is currently collaborating with Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, Tencent, and other partners to jointly build the “AI Joint Management of Six Diseases” platform. This initiative aims to shift chronic disease prevention and control from a “disease-centered” to a “patient-centered” approach, and to promote disease-based explorations in centralized drug procurement, ultimately providing patients with more cost-effective diagnosis, treatment, and medication plans.

As a pivotal year of the 14th Five-Year Plan, seven departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), jointly issued the “Implementation Opinions on Promoting Innovation and Development of Future Industries” at the beginning of this year. The document supports the vigorous development of six major industries, including future health, and highlights AI-empowered new medical services as a key direction for development. It aims to achieve widespread application of a batch of new technologies, products, business formats, and models, as well as scaled development of key industries by 2027. This aligns with the timeline targets set forth in “Document No. 41” for advancing the construction of close-knit medical consortia: by the end of 2027, close-knit county-level medical consortia will basically achieve full coverage.

In this round of deepening reforms that comprehensively shift the focus from “disease-centered care” to “health-centered care,” and transition payment models from “fee-for-service” to “pay-for-performance,” the key tasks involved are numerous and complex. It is foreseeable that rapidly replicating a standardized, AI-enabled, rational, and efficient model tailored to local conditions has become a “new prescription” for various regions to accelerate problem-solving and enhance the quality of medical services.