Miao Health Featured in Nature Index: Pioneering China's Digital Chronic Disease Management
On May 27, the internationally renowned journal Nature Index published a case study on Miao Health’s practices in chronic disease management, highlighting how the company leverages digital technologies to lead the industry toward a healthier and more promising future.
Click to View《nature》PublishedOriginal Textand Chinese translation
In China, innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things are being applied to address challenges in chronic disease prevention and control, as well as health management. The article points out that Miao Health is one of China’s leading digital health platforms. Since 2014, the company has focused on leveraging AI and big data to provide users with personalized health management services. By collecting data, conducting health risk assessments, and delivering intelligent health intervention alerts, it encourages users to pay attention to potential issues, improves various lifestyle-related chronic diseases, and streamlines the supply processes for medical services, medications, and insurance.
Research by the World Health Organization indicates that health is determined by lifestyle (60%), genetic factors (15%), social factors (10%), healthcare factors (8%), and climatic factors (7%). Evidently, lifestyle has the greatest impact on health and is the primary cause of chronic diseases. A 2020 Global Burden of Disease study published in The Lancet revealed that governments worldwide have still failed to adequately address lifestyle-related risk factors associated with chronic diseases in their public health initiatives.
In recent years, as China’s population aging accelerates, the burden of chronic diseases has become increasingly heavy. Since 2016, the Chinese government has elevated “Health for All” to a national strategy, shifting from “passive medical care” to “proactive health,” and emphasizing effective disease prevention by controlling major health risk factors. This transition moves from “treating existing diseases” to “preventing diseases before they occur,” encourages the development of the digital health industry, and shifts from reliance on the public health system to broader societal collaboration, thereby achieving joint construction and shared benefits under the “Healthy China 2030” initiative.
Professor Guo Qing, Chairman of the Health Management Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, stated that new technologies are crucial to building a Healthy China, ensuring the equity, accessibility, and effectiveness of healthcare services nationwide. He pointed out that virtual digital technologies can effectively track and incentivize health promotion, seamlessly helping millions of people develop good daily health habits. The healthcare industry needs digital transformation, and digital health management is the future of chronic disease management.
Nature mentioned in this article that, as a digital precision health management platform, Miao Health possesses an industry-leading “Health Knowledge Graph.” This graph employs deep learning algorithm models to help doctors and health managers more effectively track the progress of patients’ chronic disease management, alleviate the pressure caused by a shortage of professional health management personnel, thereby reducing marginal costs, and enabling people to smoothly transition from a passive medical care model to a more proactive health management model.
“Our AI platform has been trained on healthy recipe data, can identify more than 13,000 types of food, integrates data from approximately 7,000 academic studies, detects over 3,000 abnormal indicators, helps mitigate more than 100 key risk factors, and provides health alerts for over 1,300 diseases,” explained Dr. Luo Xiaobin, Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at Miao Health. He noted that the goal of digital health management is to address the needs of China’s large population with a high prevalence of chronic diseases, delivering personalized and effective management and health promotion tailored to different groups.
Notably, by providing effective prevention, management, and treatment measures for certain specific chronic diseases, Miao Health has developed evidence-based “digital therapeutics,” which have received authoritative certification from the Digital Therapeutics Alliance (DTA).
Digital health management is a complex systemic project that requires comprehensive prediction of risk factors and evaluation of outcomes throughout the process—from data collection and assessment to intervention—ensuring that results are traceable and measurable. Therefore, Miao Health has simplified health assessments through its H Platform for stratified health risk management and intelligently distributes intervention tasks via its M Platform for AI-driven health interventions. It is also the first enterprise in China to propose using quantitative metrics to assess individual health status and improve health behaviors.
In 2018, Miao Health partnered with the Canadian Wellness Institute (CWI), a global leader in chronic disease prevention and control and health management. By integrating CWI’s extensive clinical experience in offline chronic disease management and its 25 years of accumulated clinical effectiveness data with its own health technology capabilities, Miao Health created a “new species” of health management. This initiative provides users with personalized health management services combining “AI + human support” and “online + offline” models, and has launched offline stores in multiple cities across China.
Ms. Carrie, Global CEO of the Canadian Health Management Center, stated that since embarking on the management and intervention of chronic diseases over two decades ago, the Canadian Health Management Center and the Canadian Innovation Research Center for Chronic Diseases have amassed extensive clinical data covering various conditions for more than 7 million users worldwide. By leveraging modeling and analysis of this data, Miao Health has launched the industry’s first “AI Health Manager,” which provides online interventions to address unhealthy lifestyles among patients with chronic diseases, significantly enhancing the patient service experience.
Dr. Luo Xiaobin stated that the effective utilization of human health data and health behavior data through AI models has been transformed into an efficient solution for personalized health management. This model has attracted an increasing number of B-side partners, ranging from wearable device manufacturers and insurance companies to clinics, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and pharmacies. By leveraging its open platform capabilities, Miao Health aims to meet users’ multi-level health needs.
Liu Bangchang, Senior Vice President of Miao Health, introduced that Miao Health is China’s first platform to gradually improve lifestyles through “gamification.” The company has consistently upheld high technical standards and quality requirements, prioritizing science and medicine above all else. By integrating professional concepts from lifestyle medicine, preventive medicine, and rehabilitation medicine, it designs health tasks across multiple dimensions—including exercise, nutrition, mental well-being, and sleep—to cultivate healthy user habits through gamified operations. During real-time video streaming, its exercise video recognition engine employs deep learning to identify key body landmarks; if improper posture is detected during a user’s workout, the system promptly issues an alert.
China’s commercial health insurance sector has accelerated in recent years, with annual premium income continuing to rise. According to data from the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), health insurance premiums reached RMB 817.3 billion in 2020 and are projected to surpass RMB 2 trillion by 2025. The sustained release of demand for health insurance represents a long-term positive factor for the health management industry. There is a broad consensus within the industry that achieving high-quality development in health insurance requires strengthening the role of health management within health insurance products and services.
Jiang Chongguang, Executive Vice President and Secretary-General of the China Insurance Innovation Institute, stated that there is a natural link between commercial health insurance and health management. Digital transformation can reduce the operational risks of health insurance, leading to synchronized growth in the market size of both sectors. He emphasized that with the accelerating aging of China’s population, the high prevalence of chronic diseases, and the relative shortage of medical and professional health management personnel, active participation in managing public health risks will bring greater benefits to insurance companies.
In the commercial insurance sector, which remains a key focus of Miao Health’s continued expansion, digital health management capabilities are leveraged to fully maximize the value of health insurance. Specifically, Miao Health has built a “Insurance + Health Management” digital middle platform that empowers the entire process—pre-underwriting, during coverage, and post-claim. This platform enables seamless interconnectivity among agents, insurance companies, customers, policyholders, and healthcare service providers. By facilitating data flows and user engagement, and further delivering SaaS solutions, it plays a highly positive role in supporting interactive insurance policies and controlling medical insurance costs.
In the insurance sector, Miao Health integrates “digital therapeutics” to deliver precise health management for policyholders with non-standard health profiles, such as those with diabetes or hypertension, along with subsequent medication guidance, rehabilitation training, and expedited medical access services. To empower the digital transformation of the insurance industry, Miao Health provides a suite of services including product marketing and health service capabilities, intelligent underwriting and claims processing, a health data visualization platform, risk control, and innovative product design. To date, Miao Health has partnered with over 80 insurance clients, covering all of the top 20 insurers in the market.
Beyond insurance scenarios, Miao Health is participating in pilot projects with several local governments to jointly promote the development of “Healthy Cities.” By extending its services from outside hospitals into hospital settings, it aims to assist in controlling medical insurance costs and provide recommendations for establishing new regulatory standards in the health management industry. Liu Bangchang stated that health big data from hospitals and insurance companies represents the best and most accurate source. Miao Health ensures data security through rigorous information screening and privacy protection mechanisms, which is a crucial element in leading technological innovation and business model development.