From Single Devices to an Integrated Network: Enhancing Medical Equipment Efficiency through Digital Transformation

“Healthcare is a slow-moving industry—serious and even more rigorous. Yet it is also a fair one, where your diligence and hard work will surely be rewarded and recognized. Therefore, you must endure solitude, embrace hardship, and build your career from the ground up, brick by brick. Advance steadily, step by step, without seeking shortcuts or attempting to muddle through.”Peng Qibin, Founder and CEO of AquiferreAs stated.

After earning his master’s degree from Beihang University, Peng Qibin entered the medical device industry. Driven by his passion for the sector and his original commitment to the digital transformation of medical devices, he has spent years diligently working on the acquisition, parsing, mining, and application of underlying data from medical devices, thereby taking a solid first step in advancing the digital transformation of the industry.

In 2008, Peng Qibin, Zhang Wenyuan, and Yu Ning, driven by their deep respect for the healthcare industry, joined GE Healthcare together, marking the beginning of their professional careers. The three participated in training sessions jointly, discussed industry issues, and forged a strong bond. At that time, Peng Qibin might not have anticipated that, just a few years later, the trio would share a common goal, becoming closely intertwined with the digitalization of medical equipment.

During his eight years at GE Healthcare, Qiubin Peng progressed from the EEDP program to Senior Engineer and then to Project Manager. Over a five-year period, he led his team in developing GE’s first digital RF system for MRI from the ground up. This innovation reduced costs by 35% compared to the previous generation, improved reliability fivefold, and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in value for the company.

It was also during this process that Peng Qibin realized that achieving incremental technological breakthroughs and improving equipment efficiency one device at a time was an overly protracted endeavor. Within China’s current healthcare system, numerous medical devices still require digital transformation and upgrading.

After two to three decades of development, the public healthcare system has been equipped with a substantial amount of high-quality medical equipment resources, with a total value approaching RMB 2 trillion. Among these, there are 300,000 units of equipment valued at over RMB 1 million each.

Peng Qibin remarked, “Such high-value equipment, due to the uneven distribution of quality medical resources, has an average effective utilization rate of less than 50%. Moreover, 70,000 adverse events related to these devices are reported to the National Health Commission annually. If we could leverage our self-developed technology to make medical equipment across the industry more efficient and intelligent, it would generate tremendous value for the sector!”

2015 can be regarded as the inaugural year of digitalization in the medical device industry, with the healthcare sector undergoing a broad digital transformation. Peng Qibin and his two colleagues worked on different product lines, where they observed the digital progress within their respective areas and likewise recognizedLimitations of Single-Product Digitalization. The three have discussed together on multiple occasions,How to Apply the Architecture of Industrial Internet Platforms to the Healthcare Sector, each time more intense and with increasingly clear objectives.

In 2016, three individuals left GE and Meituan respectively to found Aquiferre.

Peng Qibin believes that digitalization is an effective remedy for improving the efficiency and quality of the entire healthcare industry, as well as the most cost-effective solution.“The future of the healthcare industry we envision is a fully interconnected and comprehensively digitalized landscape, in which all medical devices—across hospitals, brands, categories, manufacturers, and departments—can achieve seamless interoperability through a single technology. To realize this vision, we must first achieve technological breakthroughs, followed by commercial application.”

Data is the foundation of digitalization, and data from medical devices is akin to a mine; fully understanding the structure of this mine is the first step toward effective extraction and processing.Eight years of R&D experience in medical devices has given Peng Qibin a deep understanding of the underlying technology, and he has built a talent team proficient in various devices and multi-dimensional data.

Regarding the interoperability of medical device data, industry professionals are generally familiar with the generic DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) protocol. It defines medical image formats suitable for data exchange that meet clinical quality requirements, along with corresponding communication standards. Over several decades of development and accumulation, DICOM has evolved from scratch, progressing from simple functionalities to a complex system.

However, the DICOM protocol was designed to transmit patients’ clinical outcome data—commonly referred to as medical imaging data—and does not support the transmission of other non-imaging data. This includes clinical process data such as scanning operations, sequence files, and parameter settings, as well as equipment data like core component usage, operational fault logs, and calibration test results. Furthermore, DICOM provides only coarse-grained and shallow insights into metrics such as equipment operational efficiency and workload. As hospitals’ digital transformation enters a more advanced stage, these data have become essential production factors for further enhancing the efficiency and quality of medical equipment operations.

However, in reality, these non-clinical result data are often scattered at the lower levels of medical devices in the form of proprietary table structures defined by equipment manufacturers and raw logs. Each equipment manufacturer, each device type, and even each device model varies significantly.

“We aim to develop a communication protocol that enables medical devices to achieve comprehensive interoperability and normalization of all clinical and non-clinical data without any external support. This concept originated from the foundational technical layer,” introduced Peng Qibin. Previously, our work focused on the digitalization of individual devices, which amounted to isolated points; whereas nowTo achieve point-to-point connectivity and expand to comprehensive area-wide coverage, thereby building a digital network for medical devices, maximizing equipment efficiency, and delivering greater value to the industry.

All three co-founders have technical backgrounds, yet each has a distinct focus. Peng Qibin places greater emphasis on product features, identifying diverse application scenarios for the technology and helping different customers realize varied application values. Once he defines the requirements, it falls within Zhang Wenyuan’s responsibility to determine how to implement them through technology. Yu Ning, meanwhile, focuses primarily on how specific, point solutions can be reached and implemented on a broader scale.

From enabling every medical device to “speak,” to facilitating inter-device communication on a platform for seamless data circulation, we have achieved a transition from point-to-point connectivity at the data level to interactive processes at the platform layer.

In the actual R&D process,It took five years to categorize devices by type and brand, and then develop device interoperability protocols one by one.In Peng Qibin’s words, the greatest challenge lies in perseverance: adhering to a technical solution that initially lacked belief in its feasibility, persisting with a business model whose early prospects were uncertain, and staying true to the original aspiration of where the future should lead.

Initially, no one believed that hospitals would pay for such a solution, as customers did not require such fine-grained, real-time, and precise data from within the devices. Even if occasional needs arose, it would suffice to request some data from the device manufacturers, making it unnecessary to build an independent system in-house.

However, with the reform of the medical insurance payment system, profound changes are taking place in the strategic positioning and management models of healthcare institutions. Driven by Diagnosis-Related Groups (DRG), the demand for refined hospital management has risen rapidly, making digitalization—enabling visibility, controllability, and manageability—an inevitable path for hospital transformation. Coupled with increasingly stringent security regulations on medical data, hospitals have developed a clearer overall vision for future digital healthcare. There is an emerging need for autonomous availability and control over multi-dimensional medical equipment data, encompassing both clinical and non-clinical aspects, characterized by fine granularity and precise real-time accuracy.

Since 2020, driven by Aquiferre’s commercialization implementation team,The hospital-wide smart IoT platform for medical devices, a digital healthcare infrastructure product that enables comprehensive interconnectivity of underlying data across diverse categories of medical equipment, has seen widespread adoption and monetization among customers.

“During the early stages of our startup, customer willingness to purchase was unclear, and we were frequently advised to pivot toward the more essential market of medical equipment operation and maintenance services. Fortunately, our persistence has paid off, earning us both returns and recognition. Our client base has grown from one or two hospitals to dozens today. We have expanded from serving small and medium-sized hospitals in trial capacities to including major institutions such as Peking Union Medical College Hospital and West China Hospital. Additionally, we have seen repeat purchases and facility expansions from existing clients. These achievements have strengthened our confidence in the future we are committed to building,” said Peng Qibin.

During the phase of tackling core technological challenges, Aquiferre also faced significant skepticism. Would underlying data interoperability impact device operation? Are the self-developed communication protocols stable and reliable? How can broad compatibility be achieved across such a wide range of device brands and categories?

80% of Aquiferre’s team members come from the R&D and sales departments of major medical equipment manufacturers. Leveraging their accumulated expertise in the physical principles, application scenarios, and business models of medical devices, the company focuses on developing proprietary protocols. It started with MR systems from a single brand and has since expanded to cover all radiological equipment such as CT scanners, as well as ultrasound systems, linear accelerators, ventilators, and patient monitors. Aquiferre continues to increase the number of compatible brands, ranging from imported to domestically produced devices, and from established brands to emerging ones.Over the past five years, Aquiferre’s self-developed interoperability protocol for medical devices has been reliably validated on 3,000 medium-to-large medical devices across 1,000 healthcare institutions.

To date, Aquiferre has achieved breakthroughs and accumulated expertise in foundational technologies, covering over 90% of device categories valued at more than RMB 500,000 on the market with comprehensive interoperability protocols. Its products are progressively becoming modular and standardized, operating entirely independently of device manufacturers.

Besides persistence, another word that Peng Qibin frequently mentioned is“Learning”: Continuous, Unceasing Learning。

The healthcare industry is a highly diverse and complex sector that demands continuous learning and growth. In addition to keeping abreast of next-generation medical equipment and technological methodologies, it is equally essential to stay current and engage in ongoing learning to better understand customer needs.

Peng Qibin stated, “In the past, when developing equipment, our understanding of requirements was more straightforward: how to achieve lower costs and higher performance—these were the demands of medical devices. Nowadays, however, many customer needs are quite abstract. The adaptive process of understanding and assessing these requirements represents the growth we have achieved through continuous learning.”

During this process, one incident left a deep impression on Peng Qibin. Starting in 2020, many hospital clients sought to gain an intuitive understanding of the utilization efficiency and economic benefits of each medical device within their facilities. To address this need, in what format and along which dimensions should the data be presented from the perspective of hospital administrators?

This is not something to be taken for granted and implemented without due consideration. Peng Qibin’s team began to reflect on the underlying reasons.

In the process of conducting an in-depth analysis, the team learned that hospital operational models have changed following the reform of medical insurance payment methods. Previously, medical insurance reimbursed hospitals based on the specific diagnostic and treatment items provided to patients within the hospital. Under this system, hospitals were department-centric, and maximizing departmental efficiency led to maximized hospital revenue. However, after the reform of medical insurance payment methods, maximizing hospital benefits requires optimizing costs with a patient-centric approach.

Only by reaching this level of understanding can the team present the conclusions hospitals need to see from the appropriate perspective and in the proper manner, thereby supporting precise decision-making. It is precisely by adhering to a customer-centric philosophy and engaging in a thorough, root-cause analysis of requirements that we can deliver precise, high-quality service to every client.

Since the second half of 2020, with the advancement of commercialization, the company has, to date, established hospital-wide smart IoT platforms for medical equipment at 12 large Grade A tertiary hospitals, building a digital infrastructure with comprehensive interconnectivity capabilities for their medical equipment.

After years of research, development, and accumulation, Aquiferre’s independently developed AIoT digital twin technology has helped hospitals establish a medical device data middle platform with consistent standards across device categories, brands, information systems, and geographic locations, as well as a digital application transformation platform based on multi-dimensional data fusion.

Through this platform, medical devices across different departments within a hospital can be interconnected, as can those across different hospitals. Greater connectivity enables broader improvements in quality and efficiency. Smart IoT not only enhances the operational efficiency of individual hospitals but also boosts the efficiency of the entire healthcare industry, promoting quality improvement at the primary care level and increasing the cost-effectiveness of health insurance funds, thereby fundamentally addressing the structural challenge of the “inverted triangle” in China’s healthcare system.

The company’s vision is to make high-quality medical services more accessible. Looking ahead, Aquiferre plans to closely integrate digital twin technology with key factors in the supply of premium healthcare resources, leveraging technology to accelerate the replication and decentralization of these resources, thereby enhancing the quality of care and management capabilities across the entire healthcare industry.

Aquiferre is currently at a critical initial stage of commercialization. It will subsequently implement large-scale commercial deployment across China, requiring additional talent to develop scenario-based applications and market channels, as well as more industry partners to collaborate in building a digital ecosystem.

Peng Qibin’s expectations for Aquiferre mirror the standards he has always set for himself. He hopes that every member of the Aquiferre team will take pride in being healthcare professionals and find honor in serving hospitals. By attentively listening to customer needs, staying true to the original mission of enhancing industrial efficiency through hard technology, and adhering to high-quality technical standards and product service quality, they aim to contribute significantly to leading and transforming the digitalization of China’s healthcare industry.