JD Health Launches First Internet-Based Respiratory Center, Pioneering an Integrated Online-Offline Chronic Disease Management Model

From the 2003 SARS outbreak to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, most large-scale epidemics have been closely linked to respiratory diseases; as cooler weather ushers in “flu season,” the prevention and control of respiratory diseases face even greater challenges.

Amid the new normal of epidemic prevention and control, the JD Health Respiratory Center was officially launched on September 9. The center aims to establish an integrated online-and-offline model for diagnosis, treatment, and nursing care in the field of respiratory medicine, deliver a digital experience for chronic disease management, and contribute to the development of an intelligent disease prevention and control system. Professor Lin Jiangtao, a renowned respiratory specialist in China and Director of the Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at China-Japan Friendship Hospital, has been appointed as the Director of the JD Health Respiratory Center.

JD Group Vice President and JD Health CEO Xin Lijun Presents Appointment Letter to Professor Lin Jiangtao

Respiratory diseases are characterized by high transmissibility, difficulty in early detection, rapid progression, and challenges in control, making them historically the hardest-hit areas in large-scale epidemics. Chronic respiratory diseases affect a vast patient population; in China, there are approximately 100 million patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and about 45.7 million asthma patients aged 20 and above. It is therefore imperative to urgently strengthen the construction of prevention, control, and treatment systems in the field of respiratory health.

Professor Lin Jiangtao believes that there are currently two major challenges in the treatment of respiratory diseases. First, many patients struggle to access high-quality medical resources or receive timely diagnosis and treatment, leading to disease progression. Second, most respiratory diseases are chronic conditions requiring long-term follow-up and management to control symptoms or achieve recovery; however, the service model of traditional healthcare systems struggles to meet this goal.

To address the aforementioned issues, JD Health Respiratory Center is committed to optimizing the allocation of medical resources in the respiratory field, enhancing the experience of medical services, and promoting the integrated online-offline development of disease rehabilitation and prevention.

The center has assembled numerous expert physicians in the field of respiratory diseases, including Lin Jiangtao. Its diagnostic and therapeutic services cover all 12 categories of respiratory conditions, connecting respiratory specialists from 26 provinces and municipalities across China. This enables patients to more conveniently access high-quality medical resources, such as authoritative experts and renowned clinicians, online for timely disease consultation and diagnosis and treatment services; if necessary, they can be referred to offline hospitals for in-person consultations. Through the JD Health Respiratory Center, physicians can more efficiently manage diseases and conduct patient follow-ups, as well as carry out public health education and academic research.

In addition to pre-consultation and in-clinic treatment, the post-diagnosis rehabilitation phase and chronic disease management models for respiratory diseases are in urgent need of optimization and upgrading. Taking asthma as an example, traditional asthma management methods mainly include outpatient follow-ups, issuance of paper-based reports, and centralized hospital lectures. These approaches suffer from low service efficiency, inconvenience related to transportation, and the inability to access past reports and historical data at any time. Meanwhile, asthma control largely depends on patient self-management. However, factors such as a lack of symptom management and treatment capabilities, inadequate monitoring environments, and insufficient ability to maintain quality of life all adversely affect the quality of management for such chronic diseases.

To address these pain points, JD Health will leverage its supply chain advantages to partner with numerous medical device manufacturers, integrating hardware with platform data to enable intelligent prevention, treatment, and management of respiratory diseases. This approach not only helps physicians monitor patient recovery in real time and optimize treatment plans, but also shifts patient care from reactive treatment after onset to early detection and proactive intervention.

Notably, JD Health’s Respiratory Center has established a dedicated “Nursing Sub-Center.” Online, respiratory specialist nurses serve as physician assistants, supporting doctors in professional tasks such as chronic disease rehabilitation and health management for patients. Offline, through O2O service appointments via the “Internet + Nursing” model, nurses can provide home visits to offer guidance on medication and medical device usage or deliver specialized nursing care, addressing patients’ needs for home-based rehabilitative treatment. This approach innovates the nursing service model within the respiratory specialty.

“The development of respiratory medicine plays a vital role in safeguarding national public health security and ensuring the well-being of the population,” said Lin Jiangtao. “The integration of respiratory medicine with internet-based healthcare not only enables the provision of more comprehensive services to patients, but also facilitates big data analysis on disease distribution across regions, age groups, genders, and medication patterns, thereby supporting the establishment of new standards and guidelines.”