Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center Deepens Digital Transformation by Integrating Over 30 Core Business Systems into DingTalk

In recent years, public hospitals in China have been continuously advancing toward high-quality development, with digital transformation becoming a key enabler for improving quality and efficiency.

Since the beginning of this year, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (hereinafter referred to as “SYSUCC”) has leveraged DingTalk as its unified digital foundation, integrating over 30 core business systems and more than 300 work processes. This has enabled the establishment of a digital operations management system that serves over 5,000 employees and covers core scenarios including medical care, nursing, scientific research, and teaching. Furthermore, to efficiently meet the flexible needs of frontline operations, SYSUCC has developed an agile and efficient application development model based on DingTalk’s low-code platform, increasing development efficiency fivefold.

Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC), established in 1964, has evolved over more than half a century into a national key oncology base integrating medical care, teaching, scientific research, and prevention. Currently, SYSUCC operates three campuses: the Yuexiu Campus, the Huangpu Campus, and the Tianhe Campus, which is under active construction. The center serves over one million patient visits annually. To achieve its goal of becoming a world-leading cancer center by 2025, SYSUCC continues to increase its investments in scientific research, education, and other fields.

To enhance collaborative efficiency across multiple campuses and leverage digital capabilities to support medical care, scientific research, and other tasks, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center has migrated more than 30 business systems and over 300 work processes to DingTalk this year. This initiative covers more than ten core departments, including medical services, nursing, scientific research, and teaching, achieving interconnectivity among various systems and business processes, resolving data silo issues, and accelerating the digital transformation of the organization and its operations.

Take hospital scheduling systems as an example. Due to the large number of positions and complex shifts, manual schedulers previously had to spend considerable time compiling and organizing data, which was prone to errors—“the most worn-out book in hospitals is the shift schedule.” Today, DingTalk can perform real-time assessments based on trends such as examination appointments, facilitating intelligent, visualized scheduling across the entire hospital, departments, and teams, thereby achieving optimal intelligent allocation of medical personnel resources.

Due to stringent requirements for procedural standardization and safety, hospital approval processes are not only complex but also diverse, with the most intricate workflows at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center (SYSUCC) involving up to 51 branching conditions. Previously, approvals were typically conducted via paper-based signatures, often requiring personnel to visit multiple departments in person. Today, SYSUCC has migrated over 300 approval workflows to DingTalk, enabling real-time online approvals. Since its launch, this feature has been widely adopted, facilitating more than 100,000 approvals annually—including common requests such as leave applications, medical consumable requisitions, and equipment repair reports—thereby significantly enhancing inter-departmental collaboration efficiency.

Furthermore, by leveraging the DingTalk low-code platform, SYSUCC has reduced the average development time for a single application from nearly 20 days to just three days, achieving a fivefold increase in efficiency. Medical staff across multiple departments have independently learned low-code development and built dozens of applications to meet the flexible daily needs of frontline operations. For instance, the Chief of the Teaching Management Section at SYSUCC developed a graduate supervisor evaluation and appointment system using low-code tools, resolving the previous issue of labor-intensive manual collection of materials.

“DingTalk possesses robust foundational product and technical capabilities, serving as the unified infrastructure for our hospital’s digital system and connecting the core operational management systems for medical care, education, and research across the entire institution,” said Li Chaofeng, Director of the Information Center at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center. “Its high degree of openness and rich ecosystem also provide a solid platform for our deep integration and innovation.”

Besides Zhongshan Hospital, an increasing number of public hospitals are accelerating their digital transformation. According to publicly available data, more than 5,000 public hospitals in China have migrated their organizational and operational workflows to DingTalk, including the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, the Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University, and Beijing Chest Hospital affiliated with Capital Medical University.