Sanya Information Files IPO: A Pioneer in Clinical Pharmacy Services Covering Over 2,000 Medical Institutions Nationwide
At a super-large tertiary hospital in Guangzhou, the peak daily prescription volume has reached nearly 30,000. These prescriptions are reviewed by an intelligent prescription audit system before being dispensed to patients. Currently, this intelligent prescription audit system is operational in more than 2,000 medical institutions across China, continuously safeguarding patients’ medication safety.
This powerful system is the result of years of development by Hunan Sanya Information Technology Co., Ltd. Processing hundreds of thousands of prescription audits daily has enabled Sanya to accumulate extensive practical experience and provide its intelligent products with ample learning data for continuous upgrades.
As early as the 2nd Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety in 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) advocated for “Medication Without Harm,” calling on countries to take coordinated action and develop effective methods, tools, and measures to intervene in the safe use of medications and reduce medication-related harm. Medication safety has become a “mainstream consensus.”
China’s “Measures for the Administration of Prescriptions” and “Specifications for Prescription Review in Medical Institutions,” among other regulatory documents, require pharmacists to review the rationality of medication use. However, due to the heavy workload associated with prescription dispensing and a shortage of qualified clinical pharmacists authorized to conduct prescription reviews, review response times are often delayed. This indirectly reduces physicians’ consultation efficiency, particularly during peak hours when every second counts. Low efficiency in medication review has thus become a significant bottleneck. How to conduct timely and effective prescription review is a critical “pain point” that needs to be addressed.
In recent years, China’s elimination of drug markups and the normalization of volume-based procurement reflect the broader trend of controlling healthcare insurance expenditures. Meanwhile, the persistently high proportion of drug costs in hospital spending has placed increasing emphasis on rational drug use. For patients, the high cost of medical care is largely driven by expensive medications. Promoting rational drug use not only maintains therapeutic efficacy but also alleviates patients’ financial burden, making it a widely welcomed initiative.
As is well known, safety does not necessarily equate to cost-effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness does not necessarily guarantee efficacy. How to achieve safety, cost-effectiveness, and efficacy simultaneously has become the most “brain-teasing” challenge for service providers in the industry. However, behind the “economic logic” of rational drug use lies sustained investment in technological research and development.
Sanya’s core products include the “Intelligent Medication Analysis Engine,” developed through the organization, analysis, and deep learning of drug data, evidence-based medicine data, and clinical case data; the “Smart Pharmacy Platform” for hospital users, built upon this engine; the “Regional Smart Pharmacy Platform” for users such as health commissions at all levels, medical consortia, and medical alliances; and online prescription review services for internet users.
Begin with targeted breakthroughs in specific application scenarios to address individual issues, then establish a closed-loop process across the entire workflow to generate synergistic effects, ultimately forming a comprehensive solution that holistically resolves the challenge of balancing medication “safety, affordability, and efficacy.”
First, leverage an intelligent medication analysis engine with autonomous learning capabilities to conduct a comprehensive, multi-dimensional scan of prescription safety.Strive to avoid medication risks in physician-prescribed regimens related to "drug-drug, drug-diagnosis, drug-pathophysiology, and drug administration" interactions, thereby addressing safety concerns. Currently, the analysis engine has established a knowledge base covering more than 210,000 pharmaceutical products available in the Chinese market, along with an analytical rule system encompassing dozens of dimensions.
Secondly, in terms of cost-effectiveness, the analysis engine incorporates national and provincial/municipal medical insurance reimbursement audit rules, providing a unified standard for prescription cost-effectiveness reviews.Prescriptions that involve overmedication relative to “standards” will be “cut,” effectively reducing patients’ out-of-pocket expenses and lowering the proportion of pharmaceutical costs in hospitals. Six months after the Guangzhou Tianhe District Health Bureau launched the Sanya Regional Smart Pharmacy Platform, a large number of duplicate and ineffective prescriptions were intercepted, saving nearly RMB 3 million in medical insurance funds for healthcare institutions across the district.
Furthermore, after the intelligent medication analysis engine identifies medication risks in a physician’s prescription, it conducts a comprehensive evaluation and analysis of the patient’s clinical data (such as liver function, renal function, and other clinical parameters affecting drug efficacy) along with the identified risk factors., provide recommendations on drug selection and dose adjustment, while matching evidence-based data from the database for physicians’ reference, to ensure the effectiveness of patient medication.
No matter how intelligent a system is, it can only deliver value when put into use by end-users. The key lies in enabling system adoption without consuming significant time or labor resources. Sanya’s Smart Pharmacy Platform is deeply integrated into the hospital workflow of “prescribing–dispensing–administration–feedback.” By leveraging artificial intelligence technologies, the platform reduces pharmacists’ prescription review time and accelerates response to physicians, achieving feedback results in milliseconds as fast as possible. Evaluated by authoritative institutions, the system demonstrated a response time of 0.002 seconds and a 100% transaction success rate with 5,000 concurrent users performing prescription audits, maintaining normal system responsiveness throughout testing. When incorporating manual review steps, the entire process can be completed within 40 seconds.
By embedding workflows, conducting comprehensive scans, and enabling millisecond-level responses, Sanya’s intelligent pharmacy platform truly becomes “intelligent,” forming a closed-loop solution that encompasses “pre-event monitoring, in-process intervention, and post-event analysis.” This approach achieves the optimal balance among safety, cost-effectiveness, and efficacy.
In June 2019, under the leadership and organization of the Tianhe District Health Commission in Guangzhou, Sanya partnered with the Third Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University to successfully launch China’s first regional prescription review center—the Tianhe District Prescription Review Center—after six months of development. This initial endeavor attracted significant attention for its role in improving prescription quality within the region, facilitating the decentralization of high-quality medical resources to primary care levels, and ensuring the effective use of medical insurance funds. It was promptly covered by major media outlets such as Health News and Guangdong News 30 Minutes. Subsequently, this success spurred the implementation of similar projects in other regions, most notably the Shunde District Smart Pharmacy Platform Construction Project.
Previously, pharmaceutical administration officials from the Shunde District Health Bureau had to organize inspections of 16 public hospitals, requiring the deployment of more than a dozen pharmacy experts from across the district and taking over a week to complete. The routine collection of monitoring reports on the National Essential Medicines System and antimicrobial usage also consumed several days, relying on manual statistics compiled by each hospital. This process—spanning notification issuance, data collection and consolidation, and reporting—demanded significant human and material resources while failing to ensure timeliness. Since the platform’s launch, management efficiency and precision have improved substantially.
The establishment of a regional-level smart pharmacy platform has also accelerated the transformation and upgrading of pharmaceutical care models in Shunde District. Centered on patients, the platform closely integrates the work of pharmacists, physicians, and nursing staff through process-based monitoring, thereby standardizing, streamlining, and closing the loop on pharmacists’ daily workflows. This approach gradually builds a comprehensive pharmaceutical care system that spans the entire patient journey from admission to discharge. Pharmaceutical administration in Shunde District has transitioned from “digital health” to “smart health,” fully ushering in the era of Pharmaceutical Care 2.0.
Sanya’s founding team began its exploration in the field of pharmaceutical care services as early as 2011. Years of industry experience enabled the founding team to anticipate changes and trends in China’s rational drug use environment at an early stage. Currently, Sanya has established a core team spanning from research and development to market promotion. Most team members possess extensive experience in the healthcare informatics industry and have a global perspective, offering unique technical insights in areas such as medical application integration, cloud computing, data analytics, and deep learning applications.
It has also been proven that in recent years, the market potential of the pharmaceutical care sector in China has been unlocked, and Sanya has established a certain level of influence with its leading technology and experience. The intelligent medication analysis engine developed by Sanya through big data and artificial intelligence technologies has initially completed the first phase of market coverage. Next, Sanya will use prescriptions as an entry point to build new infrastructure for clinical pharmacy industry interconnection.
In the field of prescription review for rational drug use, numerous stakeholders are involved beyond patients, pharmacists, and hospitals, including pharmaceutical companies, medical insurance authorities, health commissions, and commercial insurers. Sanya aims to connect these participants, scaling in-hospital pharmaceutical services to help hospitals track patients’ post-consultation medication adherence. This facilitates integrated management of patient medication from in-hospital to out-of-hospital settings, while also providing regulatory bodies with tools for effective cost control and industry data support.
Furthermore, influenced by policies such as volume-based procurement and the registration system for pharmaceutical sales representatives in China, the traditional sales models of pharmaceutical companies have faced challenges, creating an urgent need for digital transformation through technology to enhance efficiency and expand market reach. Sanya will also integrate service resources from third-party pharmaceutical companies and insurance providers, leveraging its own strengths to empower their digital marketing efforts.