Yingkang Yisheng Enhances Clinical Specialty Capabilities Through an Ecosystem Approach to Redefine Healthcare Boundaries
In January 2022, Yuncheng was gripped by a biting winter chill. Inside Yuncheng First Hospital, located in the northern part of the city, a tense surgical procedure was underway.
The patient is a 79-year-old elderly individual suffering from severe aortic stenosis. After multiple multidisciplinary team (MDT) consultations, the expert team at the Heart Center of Yuncheng First Hospital ultimately decided to perform Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR). TAVR enables “aortic valve replacement without open-chest surgery,” representing a complex and highly challenging interventional technique that typically requires the concerted efforts of a highly skilled, experienced, and well-coordinated professional team to successfully complete.
To ensure the smooth conduct of the surgery, Yuncheng First Hospital specially invited an expert team from Beijing Fuwai Hospital to provide on-site technical guidance. In less than two hours, the patient’s condition stabilized, and President Guo Nengrui, who had been closely monitoring the entire procedure, finally breathed a sigh of relief.
This surgery marked a breakthrough for Yuncheng City in performing high-difficulty, high-risk procedures such as TAVR, serving as a strong testament to how clinical specialty development at Yuncheng First Hospital has driven advancements in medical technical capabilities.Currently, the Heart Center has become a benchmark department at Yuncheng First Hospital, with its cumulative surgical volume ranking among the top three in Shanxi Province. Yuncheng First HospitalPassed the national standardized certification for Chest Pain Centers in 2020,It is also the only medical institution in Yuncheng City capable of independently performing major vessel replacement, coronary artery bypass grafting, and minimally invasive surgeries.
The successful establishment of the Heart Center at Yuncheng First Hospital would not have been possible without the support of the comprehensive specialty capabilities of the INKON Life Healthcare Platform (hereinafter referred to as “INKON Life”). As one of Haier’s three strategic pillars, INKON Life focuses on the broader healthcare sector and has established a network of 21 hospitals across China. In October 2021, INKON Life integrated Yuncheng First Hospital into its medical ecosystem, leveraging its platform strengths to help the hospital build a renowned “Comprehensive Heart Specialty Center.” This expertise was subsequently replicated and implemented at Sichuan Friendship Hospital in Chengdu, facilitating the cross-regional flow of specialized disciplines and high-quality medical resources.
So, how exactly did Yuncheng First Hospital advance the development of its clinical specialty capabilities and achieve cross-regional replication and scaling? How did INKON Life leverage platform resources to empower it? VCBeat seeks to address these questions, offering insights for the industry on the path of privately run healthcare.
Currently, the contradiction of unbalanced and inadequate development of medical resources in China remains prominent, failing to meet the requirements for high-quality hospital development during the 14th Five-Year Plan period.
Geographically, high-quality medical resources remain concentrated in economically developed regions, while central and western regions and non-provincial capital cities suffer from inadequate service capacity. In terms of service offerings, public hospitals focus on providing basic medical and health services, failing to meet the growing and diversified healthcare demands of the population. Against this backdrop, promoting private healthcare provision has become a crucial measure to alleviate these issues.
As a robust complement to public hospitals, private healthcare has surpassed its public counterparts in both scale and growth rate; however, it still falls short of the national expectation for it to serve as an “important component and significant force.” Therefore, private healthcare must identify a breakthrough point to achieve a qualitative leap from quantitative expansion, thereby providing more medical resources to society at large.
How to Achieve a Qualitative Leap? The "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of National Clinical Specialty Capacity," released in October 2021, indicates that advancing the development of clinical specialty capacity may be one such pathway.
Guo Yanhong, Inspector of the Medical Administration and Hospital Management Bureau under the National Health Commission, previously provided an interpretation of this document. She stated that to achieve the dual goals of enhancing medical technical capabilities and improving healthcare quality, it is essential to focus on strengthening the clinical application of medical technologies, promoting balanced development of clinical specialty capabilities, reinforcing the development of specialized talent teams, optimizing healthcare service models, and improving the safety level of medical treatment.
In response, INKON Life has developed its own practical logic: focusing on a hospital with disciplinary advantages within a specific region, working alongside academic leaders to expand and strengthen these advantageous disciplines, assisting in the establishment of a stable tiered talent pool for specialized fields, and formulating clear plans for specialty development. Once the hospital has established sustainable specialty service capabilities, INKON Life replicates its strong disciplines across various regions throughout China, thereby benefiting a broader patient population.
Plan before you act. INKON Life subsequently proposed the “Major Discipline Center” construction strategy, aiming to enhance hospitals’ core clinical specialty service capabilities by leveraging platform-sharing mechanisms to mobilize high-quality medical resources and facilitate expert mobility. Yuncheng First Hospital serves as one of the practical examples of this strategy.
Clinical Specialty Capacity Building,CoreIt is still the academic leader and the team.
Led by President Guo Nengrui, Yuncheng First Hospital has leveraged the internal and external ecosystem resources of INKON Life to establish an expert recruitment mechanism characterized by “introduction, integration, and adjustment.” To date, the hospital has built a resource pool of 131 professor-level experts from nearly 30 departments across 35 renowned Grade A tertiary hospitals nationwide, including those in Beijing, Xi’an, and Taiyuan. These experts regularly visit Yuncheng First Hospital to provide outpatient consultations, perform surgeries, conduct scientific research, and offer mentorship. In terms of talent development, Yuncheng First Hospital consistently prioritizes the cultivation and enhancement of specialized technical skills, having established standardized training programs and a comprehensive talent pipeline.
To advance the development of clinical specialties, INKON Life leverages its “integration of doctors and patients” model to fully stimulate the autonomy of medical staff and their proactive commitment to enhancing service quality, thereby continuously creating optimal healthcare experiences for patients. Yuncheng First Hospital has now established eight specialized centers, including a Major Cardiovascular Center and a Major Oncology Center. The hospital currently boasts 10 municipal-level key clinical specialties in Yuncheng City, a number that exceeds the combined total of key specialties across all other hospitals within the current system.
Furthermore, by leveraging the development of the Regional Medical Center, Yuncheng First Hospital has strengthened technical collaboration and specialized support for primary care hospitals within the region, deepened cooperation within the medical consortium, effectively exerted its regional radiating and driving role, and enhanced the overall level of regional medical services.
Overall, INKON Life has established robust departments led by academic leaders within its regions, fostering vertical integration of regional patient and physician resources. This strategy has enabled the formation of a comprehensive team of medical experts across the INKON Life healthcare system. Furthermore, by collaborating with large tertiary hospitals and other medical institutions, INKON Life has built a co-creation and sharing ecosystem through medical consortiums.
In addition to bolstering the core competitiveness of individual specialties through ecological resources, INKON Life’s multidisciplinary development is also committed to opening up interaction channels within its ecosystem to achieve a “hospital-as-a-platform” model. This enables every leading discipline to be transferred and replicated across regions, thereby maximizing its value within the INKON Life medical ecosystem loop.
On December 30, 2021, with the guidance and assistance of Yuncheng First Hospital, Sichuan Friendship Hospital’s Chest Pain Center successfully completed its first stent implantation in a 75-year-old patient with 80% severe stenosis of the left anterior descending coronary artery, achieving consistency in cardiac care capabilities within the platform.
In fact, the two hospitals have strong synergies for collaboration. Sichuan Youyi Hospital is a large Grade 3A general hospital with high patient demand in its cardiology department and an urgent need to iterate new technologies and service models, which is complemented by Yuncheng First Hospital’s advanced clinical expertise in cardiology.
Empowered by the digital technologies of “IoT + 5G + AI,” INKON Life has established seamless communication channels. Experts from Yuncheng First Hospital and Sichuan Friendship Hospital continuously share medical expertise and engage in academic exchanges grounded in clinical practice.
As evident from INKON Life’s strategic planning, the expert team at Yuncheng First Hospital will formulate guidelines for the development of the cardiovascular discipline at Sichuan Friendship Hospital. Meanwhile, leveraging INKON Life’s comprehensive disciplinary service capabilities, Sichuan Friendship Hospital’s leading discipline (oncology) will similarly empower Yuncheng First Hospital, thereby enhancing its oncology department’s capabilities.
The collaborative partnership between the two hospitals can be seen as a vivid demonstration of INKON Life’s “1+N” ecosystem network. As the value creation center (“1”), Yuncheng First Hospital empowers “N” county-level medical institutions within its geographic region; within the INKON Life system, it also empowers Sichuan Friendship Hospital, one of the “N” entities.
Upon the completion of the “1+N” ecosystem network, INKON Life extends its reach into more granular scenarios, initiating a “1+N+n+H” network layout. This strategy expands services into community and home settings, providing users with a comprehensive, end-to-end lifecycle health service covering prevention, diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and elderly care from hospital to home.
The core contradiction of healthcare imbalance lies in the inaccessibility of medical resources, with the demands of primary care patients for high-quality medical resources and those of chronic disease patients for comprehensive whole-process disease management remaining unmet.INKON Life aims to establish a service network for users, covering prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation, through its “1+N+n+H” ecosystem.
The “1+N+n+H” ecosystem network leverages technologies such as the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence to break down the temporal and spatial boundaries of healthcare services. It connects hospitals at all levels, community clinics, and households, while integrating multi-party resources, ultimately realizing INKON Life’s vision of shifting from “treating existing diseases” to “preventing diseases before they occur.”
In the field of IoT-enabled healthcare services, INKON Life leverages its IoT medical ecosystem, built on interconnected technology, to bridge hospitals and homes. This has enabled the strategic implementation of its “Hospital to Home” model, facilitating the rapid horizontal replication of scenario-based ecosystems characterized by the integration of doctors and patients, and delivering warm, attentive care that makes users feel constantly supported.
The normalized medical service model of “healthcare professionals revolving around patients” helps medical staff enhance user experience value while also achieving an iteration of their own professional self-worth. Meanwhile, this model provides a direction for thinking about the path toward “value-based healthcare.”
In summary, the development of specialized departments serves as a key lever for hospital management, quality improvement, and business growth; it is the cornerstone of a hospital’s brand, reputation, and competitiveness, and even more so, the core of high-quality hospital development. With INKON Life’s continuous exploration of medical service operation models, we have reason to believe that the private hospital industry will usher in better development prospects.