How Can Over 3 Million Doctors Support the Health of 1.4 Billion People? Tencent Proposes a Cloud-Based Solution for Physicians

Recently, Tencent has made another major move.

Tencent Cloud Doctor, a one-stop cloud-based workstation specifically designed for physicians by Tencent, has been officially launched. Through Tencent Cloud Doctor, physicians can rapidly provide patients with comprehensive online services across the entire care continuum, including patient education, patient management, and follow-up consultations.

What Is a Cloud-Based One-Stop Workstation? Hospitals have physician workstations and nurse workstations; similarly, a cloud-based workstation can migrate certain physician services online, ensuring seamless integration and collaboration with offline workflows to help physicians manage patients more conveniently and efficiently.

“In an interview, a doctor told colleagues from the Tencent Cloud Healthcare team: ‘Internet healthcare has been around for nearly 20 years, but throughout this period, patients have not experienced the “sense of ritual” associated with in-person visits when receiving online services. Moreover, due to the sporadic and non-essential nature of patient needs, doctors’ online consultations have become overly fragmented.’”

Zhang Meng, Vice President of Tencent Healthcare, pointed out that through Tencent Cloud Medical, the company aims to equip each physician with a dedicated intelligent assistant. This initiative seeks to break the physical and temporal constraints of traditional doctor-patient interactions, establishing a new model of digital, precise connectivity. Furthermore, by leveraging mini-programs, it partially transplants the atmosphere and services of offline professional care to online platforms, thereby enhancing physicians’ work efficiency and improving patients’ healthcare experience.

According to data from the “Survey Report on Physicians’ Online Consultation Behaviors,” jointly conducted by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Tencent, 91% of physicians indicated that they would participate in online consultations when conditions permit. This represents a significant increase compared to the pre-pandemic period. Currently, many patients have developed the habit of consulting with physicians online before seeking in-person medical care.

Furthermore, 83% of physicians desire a dedicated platform for patient care. Leveraging its connectivity and technological capabilities, Tencent has established a cloud-based “workspace” for physicians, offering one-stop online diagnosis and treatment services.

Specifically, Tencent Cloud Medical uses Mini Programs as its platform, eliminating the need for doctors and patients to download separate apps. Patients can “check in” with their doctors by scanning a QR code, consult them on questions arising during treatment, and receive messages such as outpatient notifications and follow-up reminders. All interactions between doctors and patients are delivered via WeChat’s “Service Notifications,” enabling convenient and timely viewing while ensuring prompt, smooth, and effective communication.

User research also found that, in addition to patient quality, platform reputation, user experience, and convenience (such as automated tools like pre-consultation), these factors constitute the third most important consideration for doctors when selecting an internet-based healthcare platform.

Fang Haibo, General Manager of Tencent’s Medical Ecosystem Products, stated, “We have identified numerous unmet needs among physicians in their use of online diagnosis and treatment tools. Therefore, Tencent Cloud Doctor will fully leverage Tencent’s long-accumulated capabilities in user insights, product development, and operations to provide physicians with user-friendly, practical, one-stop digital tools, aiming to become an essential standard in their daily practice.”

On Tencent Cloud Healthcare, physicians can categorize patients into groups based on keywords tailored to their conditions, enabling efficient and refined batch management. During the pre-consultation phase, Tencent Cloud Healthcare provides pre-consultation templates that collect patients’ basic information and disease status through intelligent conversational interfaces, thereby reducing the time physicians spend on manual inquiries.

Currently, Tencent Cloud Healthcare collaborates with teams of authoritative experts to develop generalized out-of-hospital management plan templates for more than ten common chronic diseases. Physicians can send tailored management plans to patients, and the system automatically delivers patient education, medication reminders, and other content based on the patient’s disease progression cycle, ensuring long-term, scientific, and standardized intervention. During the follow-up phase, Tencent Cloud Healthcare enables intelligent follow-up visits; when necessary, physicians can communicate with patients to arrange transitions to offline outpatient consultations, thereby ensuring comprehensive treatment efficacy.

Furthermore, Tencent Cloud Doctor provides physicians with personalized services such as voice-based patient education, a professional medical illustration library, one-click conversion of text and images into videos, and PC-based editing capabilities, facilitating convenient and efficient creation of popular science content. High-quality content will be distributed across Tencent’s full-content platforms, including Tencent News and Tencent KanDian, thereby enhancing physicians’ influence and patient reach. In the future, Tencent Cloud Doctor will also develop supporting tools to assist physicians in clinical research.

Another function of Tencent Cloud Healthcare lies in amplifying physicians’ capabilities.

Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and President of the Cloud and Smart Industries Group, shared the following story: “In the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, urgent circumstances temporarily disrupted in-person connections between doctors and patients. Many doctors adopted digital tools to rebuild the bridge for patients seeking medical advice and treatment. At that time, tens of thousands of doctors provided online consultations to 15 million visits through the free clinic platform launched by Tencent. Dr. Zhou Xue from Shanghai, whose husband had joined a medical team supporting Hubei Province, leveraged her smartphone to provide cloud-based assistance in the fight against the epidemic. Over two months, she answered questions for more than 1,300 patients, with consultation records exceeding 400,000 words.”

What Tencent is doing is extending this capability, enabling more doctors to possess the same expertise as Dr. Zhou Xue, thereby benefiting a broader population.

To address this demand, the Cloud Clinic initiative plans to tackle the issue from two directions.

The first is “connectivity.” Leveraging Tencent’s connectivity capabilities, outpatient consultations that traditionally take over ten minutes can be extended into “real-time online” interactions. This not only enables physicians to transition from “disease treatment” to “health management,” but also brings “chronic disease management” from theory into practice.

“Data show that chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and cancer, now account for more than 70% of the total disease burden in China. For patients with chronic conditions, long-term follow-up and management are even more important than communication in the outpatient clinic. Are they taking their medications on schedule? When should they return for follow-up visits? Patients need to establish a closer relationship with their physicians,” explained Tang Daosheng.

“In the past, the connection between doctors and patients was severed once patients were discharged from the hospital. Chronic disease management relied primarily on patient self-discipline, often leading to issues such as unscientific management and poor compliance. Through the Cloud Medical Platform, doctors can maintain direct contact with discharged patients, develop tiered disease management plans tailored to individual conditions, and oversee their implementation. Dr. Hu Yang, a pulmonologist from Shanghai, enrolls his patients in the Cloud Medical Platform and regularly sends them management plans and daily care guidelines. This approach not only reduces the travel burden for follow-up patients from distant regions such as Yunnan, but also frees up outpatient resources to serve more new patients.”

Furthermore, patients’ correct understanding of the entire diagnosis and treatment process serves as the knowledge foundation for chronic disease management. To facilitate patient education, Tencent Medical Encyclopedia has accumulated entries on tens of thousands of diseases, which will be integrated with Tencent Cloud Healthcare to serve as a medium for communication between doctors and patients. The Cloud Healthcare platform also provides intelligent tools to help physicians rapidly customize patient education materials, thereby improving patient adherence.

Second is “Intelligence.” Specifically, cloud-based consultation rooms can leverage “digital assistants” to help physicians reduce their workload and improve efficiency.

During clinical consultations, essential tasks such as patient history taking, reviewing past medical records, and entering and archiving case data inevitably consume a significant amount of physicians’ time. Artificial intelligence capabilities, including natural language processing and image recognition, can play a substantial role in alleviating this burden. By automating functions such as pre-consultation triage, organization of test reports, and medical record management, AI can save physicians considerable time. The deep integration of digital assistants with clinical workflows can free healthcare professionals from administrative and repetitive tasks, allowing them to devote their limited energy more effectively to core diagnostic and therapeutic decision-making and the delivery of medical services.

Amid technological innovation, AI not only helps alleviate physicians’ workload but also drives new growth in medical innovation. Through continuous patient management, physicians can provide an empirical foundation for future medical research, thereby unlocking greater professional value.

“While focusing on the present, we must also look to the future. Looking ahead 10 to 20 years, under the pressure of an aging population, we hope to identify new approaches to alleviate the burden on the healthcare system. Achieving this goal requires joint efforts with our partners,” said Zhang Meng, Vice President of Tencent Healthcare.

Following the launch of Tencent Cloud Healthcare, Tencent entered into strategic partnerships with Penguin Almond, Sipei Health Technology, and Yidu Cloud, respectively, to fully leverage their respective resource advantages and jointly build a comprehensive service network for physicians.

As for the long-term value of Tencent Cloud Healthcare, it can perhaps be best described in the words of Tang Daosheng:

“Individuals are the cells of society, and ‘connectivity’ is the process that links these cells into tissues, generating vitality. Precise connectivity between doctors and patients can facilitate patient treatment and unlock the professional value of physicians, thereby injecting greater vitality into the healthcare system. Tencent aims to leverage its strengths in connectivity and technology, collaborating with ecosystem partners to streamline every interaction between doctors and patients. This effort is designed to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and benefit of medical services. By co-establishing a full-lifecycle patient health management system with physicians, Tencent seeks to contribute to a healthier future for all.”