HuaChain Health Completes Tens of Millions RMB Angel Funding to Accelerate the Construction of a Medical Scientific Data Collaboration Network
VCBeat has learned that Shandong Hualian Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Hualian Medical”) recently completed an angel round of financing amounting to tens of millions of yuan.This funding round was led by the Shandong Industrial Research Equity Investment Fund of Funds, a high-quality state-owned capital fund in Shandong Province, and Jinan New Momentum Artificial Intelligence Venture Capital, with industry partner Tospur participating as a follow-on investor.Through this round of financing, Hualian Medical will continue to iterate its product technology, accelerate the commercialization of scientific research achievements, and intensify market expansion efforts.
Hualian Medical was founded in 2018, primarilyUndertake the technology transfer of the National Institute of Health and Medical Big Data (hereinafter referred to as “National Research Institute”), continuously promote the technological translation and application of health and medical big data through industry-academia-research collaboration.
The National Research Institute isThe First National Institute of Health and Medical Big Data, Approved by the Department of Planning of the National Health Commission, is a health and medical big data platform for industry, academia, and research, jointly established by Shandong University, the Shandong Provincial Health Commission, and the Jinan Municipal People's Government. It is currently the leading operational health and medical big data platform in China.
Guided by the development of digital health initiatives and industries, and focusing on fields related to healthcare big data, the National Research Institute adheres to data-driven research innovation. It has established a novel interdisciplinary discipline known as Medical Data Science, along with an integrated talent cultivation system encompassing undergraduate education, master’s/doctoral graduate studies, continuing education, and professional training. Furthermore, it has pioneered a new paradigm for hypothesis-driven medical research based on data within China, dedicated to transforming big data into precise evidence.Supporting the Development of the National Health and Medical Big Data Center (North), to establish an international platform for the discipline of high-end medical data science.
The Enterprise United Research Institute is committed to jointly building China's most advanced "Medical Science Data Collaboration Network,"withEstablish a data platform centered on causal inference algorithms for medical big data within healthcare institutions, adopt a hybrid technical architecture combining centralized and distributed systems, and build a research collaboration network with unified standards and open interfaces across the region, serving healthcare institutions at all levels and of all types within the region, Scientific ResearchInstitutions and universities provide high-quality shared data services.
While accelerating the efficient output of scientific research achievements, we aim to realize an innovative closed-loop practice of medical big data encompassing “healthcare big data, medical science big data, evidence-based medicine, and industrial translation of technological achievements,” thereby continuously empowering the development of multiple sectors, including clinical research, pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, and health management.
With the support of state-owned capital funds and the assistance of leading technology companies in the industry,Going forward, the Company will continue to uphold the philosophy of leveraging technological innovation to drive development, steadily strengthen industry-academia-research collaborations and the application of technical partnerships, and closely align with the “Twenty Measures” outlined in the Opinions on Building a Basic Data System to Better Leverage the Role of Data Elements issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council, thereby fully supporting the implementation of applications in clinical scientific research and pharmaceutical R&D.
Leveraging scientific research as a cornerstone, the company will continuously optimize and iterate its products to maximize the value creation of data elements by data producers—namely, healthcare institutions. While addressing the pain points surrounding the accessibility of medical big data, it aims to promote the reuse and full utilization of data value, and further explore mechanisms for the paid use and open sharing of medical data based on value-driven demand.Using scientific research data as a pilot, we aim to establish a mechanism for the transmission of data network value, encouraging medical institutions to participate more, contribute more, and benefit more. This will facilitate the reuse and value enhancement of medical data, thereby supporting the development of the healthcare big data industry.
With the accelerated development of China’s healthcare industry, the integration of medical data and medical research has become increasingly close,The high-quality, data-driven collaborative network for sharing medical research has become a key driver in enhancing the high value of healthcare data as a critical factor of production.However, during the past two decades of unchecked growth in medical IT, the industry has accumulated numerous entrenched problems.
Medical data commonly faces thorny issues such as severe data silos, high barriers to data governance and reuse, a lack of systematic approaches to leveraging data for industry empowerment, low levels of data standardization, data security concerns, and the absence of legally compliant cross-institutional data platforms.
Although China possesses a vast volume of medical data, it still lacks full-lifecycle, large-sample, high-quality data to support epidemiology, clinical trials, real-world evidence, and precision medicine research, thereby constraining the development of the digital economy in the biopharmaceutical sector.
Given the current landscape, whoever achieves a breakthrough in making large-scale, high-quality, and compliant medical data accessible and usable will seize the initiative in the digital economy and secure the academic high ground in clinical medical research, thereby gaining an almost insurmountable competitive advantage.
It is well known that clinical diagnosis and treatment data from large medical institutions constitute the most valuable segment of healthcare data; however, cross-institutional data aggregation, governance, and open sharing for utilization remain critical bottlenecks. Therefore,Hualian Medical has independently developed a big data collaboration network based on the principles of data value transmission, multi-party benefits, secure sharing, unified standards, collaborative trustworthiness, and adherence to the logic of evidence-based medicine.It not only helps clinicians, medical experts, and research scholars produce research findings more quickly and efficiently, but also promotes China’s biopharmaceutical industry to achieve leapfrog development based on high-quality, large-sample research data.
The company's product portfolio includes:
SMART_MSDW can empower collaborative centers (such as hospitals, health commissions, and universities) by providing them with a standardized big data platform featuring unified interfaces. Leveraging intelligent data governance technologies to process multi-source heterogeneous raw medical data, the system achieves coding accuracy rates exceeding 80% for diseases, surgeries, laboratory tests, and medications.
Meanwhile, NLP technology directly maps textual data to clinical activity models, thereby rapidly generating high-quality medical scientific data warehouses suitable for clinical research and big data-based causal inference analysis. This supports medical research that leverages the complementary advantages of “data-driven” and “hypothesis-driven” approaches, establishes hospital-wide medical data assets, and provides a continuous, rapid supply of high-quality data sources for clinical research across multiple departments and disease types.
Figure 1 Product: SMART Medical Science Data Warehouse (SMART_MSDW)
Drawing on the big data real-world study design framework proposed by the National Academy of Governance, SMART_BRWS has leveraged OHDSI’s open-source R code to develop modules for regularized propensity score matching and inverse probability weighting adjustment for average effect estimation, negative control design, synthetic positive control design, P-value calibration, and confidence interval calibration.
Furthermore, SMART_BRWS extends its suite of statistical analysis tools to include cohort-based clinical pathway analysis, survival analysis, epidemiological analysis, personalized effect estimation, and risk prediction models—all essential for real-world studies. It provides clinical researchers with a standardized, end-to-end, no-code platform for the design and analysis of real-world studies, significantly enhancing the productivity of scientific research outputs.
Figure 2Product: Big Data Real-World Research Platform (SMART_BRWS)
SMART_MESH aligns with government-related specifications for collaborative scientific research data, linking various collaborative centers to achieve visualized management of data resources and outcomes, exploratory multi-center data analysis, synergy between research data and operational workflows, and shared applications such as secure multi-party computation. Furthermore, leveraging a data value transmission mechanism, it continuously and efficiently supports the implementation of clinical research and pharmaceutical R&D applications.
Figure 3 Product: SMART_MESH, a Software for Network Management and Collaboration of Scientific Research Data
It is reported that one of its typical cases—Weihai Municipal Hospital—has established 14 specialized disease cohorts based on the project and data platform, rapidly identifying over 100 potential research paper topics, with more than 30 manuscripts currently in preparation and 5 already published, thereby supporting the generation of a batch of core institutional achievements. Meanwhile, the hospital has established linkages and collaborative mechanisms with multiple biopharmaceutical partners and is further evaluating the implementation of related pharmaceutical R&D and market promotion projects.
As the product portfolio matures and core technological capabilities continue to advance,The company has become one of the software service providers for the Collaborative Center of the “National Health and Medical Big Data Science and Technology Innovation Application Platform” project (hereinafter referred to as the Sci-Tech Innovation Platform).。
It is understood that the sci-tech innovation platform is a collaborative system built upon the framework agreement signed by the health commissions of the nine provinces along the Yellow River in Jinan. Relying on the “National Health and Medical Big Data Center (North)” (hereinafter referred to as the “Northern Center”), it establishes the National Health and Medical Big Data Development and Application Alliance. With the application of disease-specific data as the entry point, the platform is supported by the National Health and Medical Big Data Sci-Tech Innovation Application Platform.
Leveraging the Development and Application Alliance, Hualian Medical has taken the construction of a scientific and technological innovation collaboration system as its entry point to explore and establish a “1+1+N” collaborative partnership model. The Provincial Statistical Information Center of the Provincial Health Commission is responsible for building the provincial-level center of the sci-tech innovation platform; local medical colleges and universities serve as the support hubs; and research teams along with medical institutions having needs for scientific research collaboration act as the collaborative nodes, jointly undertaking the development of the collaboration center.
Figure 4. Collaborative Network System of Medical Sciences for Sci-Tech Innovation Platforms
The collaborative system for sci-tech innovation platforms has been implemented and validated in Shandong Province.
As part of the expansion of the Northern Center collaborative system, it has been promoted since September 2021, starting from Shandong Province,Deployment and construction of the provincial-level central and support systems have been completed; deployment and application have been initiated at 16 collaborative centers within Shandong Province, and 70 research data cohorts have been established., has successively produced a series of scientific research achievements, demonstrating strong development momentum. Meanwhile, Hualian Medical’s construction experience and model in Shandong have been replicated and promoted for implementation in collaboration with the People's Government of Queshan County, Henan Province, and the scientific research collaboration system of Inner Mongolia Medical University. Cooperation is currently being gradually expanded in Hainan, Xinjiang, and the nine provinces along the Yellow River Basin.
It is worth mentioning that itsThe platform was successfully recognized as a Typical Case of Digital Health (Batch II) by the National Health Commission in 2022.
As one of the core technology support providers,The Company has signed contracts and implemented projects for 10 medical institutions across the four prefecture-level cities of Jinan, Zibo, Linyi, and Yantai, as well as for the establishment of two collaborative centers outside the province.Supported the generation of a batch of core clinical research achievements at the hospital, while also winning multiple awards, includingThe multi-center clinical collaboration solution was selected as a benchmark case for privacy-preserving computation in the 2022 Big Data “Galaxy” program; it also received the Outstanding Case Award at the 2nd China Trusted Blockchain Security Attack and Defense Competition, and the 2022 FISCO BC Open Source Ecosystem Excellence Contribution Award, among others.
During the project promotion process, the company further recognized that scientific research is one of the direct levers to significantly improve the quality of medical data, orderly promote data circulation and sharing, and facilitate enterprise applications (such as new drug development). It also believes that clinical research’s demand for data requires not only high accuracy but also traceability.
First, the data curated for research applications are of exceptionally high quality;
Second, only high-quality medical data can generate greater value, thereby further driving applications in industries with robust demand, such as clinical research, new drug development, precision insurance model design, and AI training.
Therefore, the company is also actively applying to participate in the pilot programs for market-based allocation of factors of production and the implementation of compensated use of public data.Exploring the Use of "Scientific Research Cohort Data" as an Entry Point to Maximize the Value Creation of Data Elements by Data Producers—Medical Institutions, by leveraging high-demand applications such as multi-center clinical research and enterprise applications as a breakthrough, we will coordinate the advancement of foundational institutional frameworks for medical institutions and big data centers in areas including ownership of research data, asset valuation, circulation and trading, revenue distribution, and security governance. This will unlock the potential of data as a factor of production, strengthen, optimize, and expand the digital economy, and enhance new drivers of economic growth.
Regarding this round of financing, all investors hold a positive outlook on the future development of Hualian Medical.
Shandong Industrial Research Equity Investment Fund of Funds stated“As investors in Hualian Medical, we have witnessed the team’s strong execution capabilities and professional service standards. Hualian Medical has achieved breakthroughs in the governance and application of healthcare big data, making significant contributions to clinical research, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and personal health management. We are honored to partner with Hualian Medical in this funding round and look forward to growing together in the years ahead. Our confidence in Hualian Medical is based on the following: In terms of the team, Hualian Medical integrates nearly 20 years of medical big data achievements from Professor Xue Fuzhong’s team, possessing profound industry insights and substantial technical expertise. Regarding its product pipeline, Hualian Medical’s products under development demonstrate high clinical competitiveness and commercial value. We expect Hualian Medical to achieve steady and rapid growth with support from all stakeholders, contributing to the intelligent and digital transformation of the healthcare industry.”
Jinan New Momentum Artificial Intelligence Venture Capital stated"In the era of the digital economy, data has become one of the core factors of production. Among these, the potential value of health and medical big data is being unlocked, ushering in a golden age for the health and medical big data industry. Meanwhile, as such data involves national strategic security and personal privacy, how to utilize it reasonably, legally, and compliantly while maximizing its value remains a significant challenge in the field of medical big data. Building on over two decades of research achievements by the National Institute of Health and Medical Big Data, and within the framework of the National Health and Medical Big Data Center (North), Hualian Medical has creatively developed a medical big data service model. This model is driven by a medical big data scientific research and innovation platform, with a medical collaboration center network serving as the vehicle for value enhancement. This approach has stimulated the standardized collection and organization of data within the healthcare system, ensured the security of raw data, and laid the foundation for fully realizing its value. Based on the sci-tech innovation platform and the collaboration center network, Hualian Medical provides scientific research and data services to governments, pharmaceutical companies, insurance firms, and other stakeholders. This has significantly unleashed the value of medical data in areas such as policy formulation, discovery of new outcomes, drug discovery, and personalized insurance under a data-driven model. Hualian Medical’s active exploration in the field of medical big data is poised to lead the development of the health and medical big data industry."