Wissdom Sounds a New Call: Leveraging IoT to Unlock Blue Ocean Markets in Hospital Environmental Monitoring and Infection Control

With central government direction and increased investment, “New Infrastructure” has already gained widespread attention even as summer is just beginning to heat up. Among the seven key sectors of New Infrastructure, the Internet of Things (IoT) is an omnipresent force, with its technology deeply integrated into every module involved in New Infrastructure. The era of the Internet of Everything has arrived.

WISSDOM is a national high-tech enterprise dedicated to providing professional medical IoT solutions and services to hospitals through innovative technologies. It has gained a notable reputation in the medical IoT sector and represents the second entrepreneurial venture of CEO Feng Zhiqing.

In the summer of 2006, he embarked on his “Beijing drifter” journey, using the savings accumulated from pharmaceutical sales after graduating from university. He founded a pharmaceutical agency and distribution company, which achieved annual sales of up to RMB 890 million. Through interactions with clients and site visits, he identified a critical gap: while drug manufacturing is backed by Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) certification and drug distribution is secured by Good Supply Practice (GSP) compliance, how can the “quality” of drugs be ensured once they reach medical institutions?

In 2013, leveraging his extensive familiarity with the domestic pharmaceutical market and driven by concerns over the current state of pharmaceutical storage, Feng Zhiqing founded WISSDOM. The company is dedicated to providing hospitals with professional, customized medical IoT solutions through the application of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, thereby safeguarding the quality and safety of in-hospital drug storage and transportation.

Over the past seven years, WISSDOM has continuously enhanced its operational capabilities, expanding its core business from an initial focus on medical cold chain and environmental monitoring management platforms to a comprehensive suite of hospital infection prevention and control (IPC) solutions. This expansion includes the addition of a hand hygiene compliance management platform, an intelligent hand hygiene analytics system, and a full-process traceability management platform for medical waste. These advancements have significantly strengthened the safety management of items, personnel, and environments within healthcare facilities, as well as elevated infection control standards.

Looking back on its development journey, WISSDOM has grown from a “one-person army” to a team of over 100 employees, establishing service centers or offices across seven major regions: North China, East China, Central China, South China, Southwest China, Northwest China, and Northeast China. It provides customized service solutions to users at more than 300 Grade A tertiary hospitals nationwide. This achievement is a testament to WISSDOM’s deep commitment to the medical Internet of Things (IoT) sector and its unwavering dedication to its original mission: everything originates from hospital users, and everything serves hospital users.

Pharmaceutical cold chain refers to a systematic engineering process for the physical movement of drugs from manufacturers to end-users, encompassing production, transportation, storage, and usage. As previously mentioned, standards are already in place to safeguard drug production and transportation; how, then, can the hospital storage process be ensured?

WISSDOM’s Medical Cold Chain and Environmental Monitoring Management Platform, built on IoT and big data technologies, represents an extension and expansion of GMP/GSP-compliant pharmaceutical cold chain monitoring systems into hospital settings. In response to hospitals’ actual management needs, WISSDOM has established an IoT-based three-tier in-hospital integrated monitoring platform for pharmaceutical temperature, humidity, and environmental conditions. This platform enables real-time, networked, comprehensive monitoring of temperature and humidity in storage and transportation equipment and facilities for all pharmaceuticals (including cold-chain drugs and vaccines), as well as real-time monitoring of ambient temperature, humidity, power supply status, fire smoke detection status, oxygen concentration, carbon dioxide concentration, airborne particulate matter, various total volatile organic compound (TVOC) concentrations, and door open/close status across relevant equipment and work environments.

In short, WISSDOM’s integrated monitoring and management platform for drug temperature, humidity, and environmental conditions now covers nearly all hospital departments. “As long as a parameter affects the safety of personnel, assets, or the environment within the hospital, the platform can enable real-time IoT-based monitoring.” It is reported that all software applications and hardware devices within WISSDOM’s cold chain and environmental factor monitoring platform are independently developed, manufactured, and offer personalized customization.

Architecture Diagram of the Medical Cold Chain and Environmental Monitoring Management Platform

Leveraging its inherent medical expertise, WISSDOM has gained a deep understanding of the true needs of hospital users, thereby carving out a unique business model. While traditional IoT enterprises primarily generate revenue from the development and sale of device software, along with limited after-sales maintenance fees, WISSDOM provides professional software applications and hardware devices to hospitals free of charge, deriving its main revenue from subsequent platform service fees.

The formation of this business model is closely tied to WISSDOM’s end users.

As professional medical rescue entities, hospitals dedicate 80% of their medical staff’s workload to core clinical activities, leaving them with little capacity to attend to non-core matters. Due to the large volume of in-house medical equipment and information systems coupled with limited management personnel, these assets often operate without adequate supervision. High-value equipment and areas, such as ultra-low temperature freezers and liquid nitrogen tanks, lack dedicated personnel for comprehensive tracking and monitoring, even when real-time monitoring platforms are deployed. Consequently, when the platform detects faults, responsible parties struggle to implement specialized response measures promptly, leading to incalculable losses during the wait for professional intervention. Furthermore, monitoring platforms require specialized operation and maintenance; certain medical equipment and facilities necessitate annual metrological verification; and the procurement of new equipment involves model selection, incoming inspection, and initial configuration. These responsibilities far exceed the operational scope of healthcare institutions themselves.

WISSDOM has introduced a model that provides a customizable monitoring platform free of charge, accompanied by ongoing support services. In addition to essential platform development, upgrades, and maintenance, WISSDOM employs an intensive service system combining central monitoring with local on-site support. A 24/7 monitoring center is staffed by professionals who regularly review key parameters and indicators for hospitals connected to the platform. Upon detecting any parameter exceedances or equipment failures, the center immediately notifies the local service team for on-site intervention. Users may also directly contact either the monitoring center or the local service team for any platform-related assistance. This approach not only continuously enhances hospital safety management but also significantly reduces the operational burden on users.

Medical Cold Chain and Environmental Monitoring Management Platform: Supporting Hardware Devices and Visualization Platform

To date, WISSDOM’s IoT monitoring platform for healthcare institutions has deployed nearly 2,000 smart IoT gateways and over 20,000 smart sensor nodes across China. It provides comprehensive environmental monitoring for approximately 400 healthcare institutions dispersed across 30 provinces and municipalities, fully safeguarding the safety of medical supplies, personnel, and the hospital environment. The platform generates more than 2.1 billion pieces of environmental monitoring data annually. WISSDOM’s proprietary big data analytics and AI mechanisms process, intelligently analyze, and visualize this data in real time, enabling real-time data transmission and interaction while providing intelligent decision-support capabilities.

WISSDOM’s service team has continued to expand alongside the widespread adoption of its platform. Currently, WISSDOM has established localized service teams across seven major regions in China, providing 24/7 online support and call center services, as well as offline rapid response to alerts and on-site handling, ensuring that any anomalies in monitoring parameters are addressed immediately. In addition, WISSDOM offers a diverse range of professional services, including technical consultation, regular inspections, equipment parameter adjustment, equipment selection, report preparation, and metrological validation, comprehensively safeguarding the safety of the hospital environment, assets, and personnel.

During the provision of environmental monitoring services to hospitals, Feng Zhiqing came into contact with the Hospital Infection Control Department, a “marginalized” unit, and identified potential market opportunities therein. By analyzing the hospital infection control market, WISSDOM ultimately selected medical waste management and hand hygiene as its two niche entry points.

Hand hygiene and medical waste management constitute the beginning and end of hospital-acquired infection (HAI) prevention and control, respectively. The core of HAI prevention lies in interrupting transmission pathways; hand hygiene among healthcare workers is the most important, simplest, most effective, and cost-efficient measure for preventing and controlling HAIs. Due to characteristics such as potential and acute infectivity, and being several times more hazardous than municipal solid waste, improperly managed medical waste can become a new source of hospital-acquired infections. Thus, medical waste disposal is also a critical final step in the HAI prevention and control process.

The importance of hand hygiene is self-evident. However, due to factors such as low awareness among healthcare workers and limitations in environmental infrastructure, compliance with hand hygiene protocols remains suboptimal in clinical practice. Currently, the global average compliance rate for hand hygiene ranges between 40% and 50%, while the average compliance rate in China is even lower.

Based on this, WISSDOM has developed an IoT-based Hand Hygiene Compliance Management System to standardize the monitoring of healthcare workers' hand hygiene practices. This system steadily improves compliance among medical staff through intelligent guidance and implements quantitative management of compliance rates. With a positioning accuracy of 3–5 centimeters, the system can identify appropriate moments for hand hygiene and provide audio-visual alerts. Furthermore, it offers diverse reporting and statistical functions to analyze hand hygiene compliance across different departments and job roles, providing recommendations for improvement.

WISSDOM Hand Hygiene Compliance Management Platform: Supporting Hardware and Software Applications

“High compliance does not equate to effective hand hygiene.” If a healthcare worker demonstrates high compliance but performs hand hygiene incorrectly each time, the overall effectiveness of their hand hygiene will be significantly compromised. Traditional monitoring methods based on bacterial culture are complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, lacking real-time capabilities and feedback mechanisms. In response, WISSDOM has partnered with HandinScan, a renowned Hungarian hand hygiene management company, to launch an Intelligent Hand Hygiene Analysis System. Leveraging advanced image processing algorithms, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge software technology, the system provides real-time, objective feedback on hand hygiene quality and generates statistical data.

WISSDOM Intelligent Hand Hygiene Analysis System

The intelligent hand hygiene scanner within the system can scan and inspect hands after hand hygiene procedures using a disinfectant containing long-wave ultraviolet (UV-A) fluorescent agents and alcohol. The embedded monitoring software rapidly assesses hand hygiene status, specifically the percentage of surface coverage and missed areas on the hands. The reporting system provides objective and comprehensive data on hand hygiene assessment along with recommendations for improvement.

According to Feng Zhiqing, the medical waste industry currently typically employs QR codes and RFID technology to assign unique codes to medical waste at the point of generation within hospital departments. Traceability is achieved throughout the entire circulation process via scanning and weighing. However, most systems only accomplish traceability of medical waste within the hospital premises.

Recognizing the market gap in off-site traceability of medical waste, WISSDOM developed a full-process traceability management platform for medical waste. Compliant with various medical waste management regulations, the platform can interface with provincial-level medical waste management systems, achieving end-to-end traceability from in-hospital collection to final disposal of medical waste.

WISSDOM’s End-to-End Traceability Management Platform for Medical Waste leverages automatic positioning, intelligent weighing, wireless LoRa, and RFID technologies to assign QR code identifiers to various types of medical waste. The platform dynamically records information such as healthcare institutions, departments, waste categories, waste weight, handover personnel, and timestamps, while performing multiple verifications of waste weight. It also provides location tracking for off-site transport vehicles and uses RFID technology to monitor in real time the temperature and humidity of medical waste storage, as well as disposal parameters (temperature, pressure, and duration).

WISSDOM Medical Waste Full-Process Traceability Management Platform: Supporting Hardware and Visualization Platform

When an anomaly occurs, the platform instantly sends alert notifications to the responsible personnel, thereby achieving closed-loop information management for the entire process of medical waste handling—from in-hospital classified collection, handover, and transport, to entry into and exit from temporary storage areas, off-site transportation, warehousing, and final disposal.

In 2019, WISSDOM began to strengthen its presence in the field of hospital infection control, steadily expanding its service scope from large and medium-sized medical institutions to grassroots community health centers. In October, the WISSDOM Medical Waste Full-Process Traceability Management Platform and the Hand Hygiene Compliance Management Platform were launched successively and have been adopted by numerous renowned medical institutions across China. The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic this year has further accelerated the growth of WISSDOM’s IoT-based hospital infection control business. By leveraging IoT technology to continuously empower in-hospital infection control and epidemic prevention efforts, WISSDOM’s infection control products have seized new development opportunities.

In 2020, WISSDOM will increase its investment in technological R&D, extensively recruit R&D talent, and continue to refine its existing products, thereby providing healthcare institutions with more efficient and convenient solutions for environmental safety and hospital-acquired infection control. Meanwhile, WISSDOM will expand the scale of its marketing and regional service teams to rapidly increase its market share and service coverage, aiming to become a leader in the medical Internet of Things (IoT) industry. It is reported that WISSDOM, which has never raised external funding since its inception, intends to launch a round of financing in the capital markets amid its current strong growth momentum.