Zhiyun Health and Shulian Yikang Announce Strategic Partnership to Leverage Chronic Disease Big Data for Precision Insurance Cost Control

VCBeat has learned that Zhiyun Health, a digital health company specializing in chronic disease management, has recently entered into a strategic partnership with Chengdu Shulianyikang Technology Co., Ltd., a third-party enterprise focused on medical insurance cost containment, to jointly explore data-driven insurance services.

Zhiyun Health, founded in 2015 (formerly known as Zhangshang Tangyi), has evolved from its initial focus on consumer-side diabetes management to building a hospital-oriented SaaS open platform—Zhiyun Yihui. Zhiyun Health’s primary service scenarios are centered within hospitals. The Zhiyun Yihui SaaS solution is deployed within hospital settings, leveraging a modular and customizable architecture built on the Zhiyun Yihui platform to meet the diverse needs of different medical institutions. Serving as a system for physicians’ daily clinical workflows, it integrates with hospital HIS (Hospital Information Systems) to achieve seamless data interoperability.

It is reported that Zhiyun Health’s SaaS system has been deployed in over 1,000 hospitals, processing approximately one billion data records annually and serving more than 20 million users per year. By integrating medical data with behavioral data, Zhiyun Health provides foundational data support for product design and sales to manufacturers in the insurance and pharmaceutical consumables sectors.

Shulianyikang is a service provider that leverages artificial intelligence and big data technologies to deliver data-driven solutions for the broader healthcare sector. The company has been dedicated to addressing challenges in health insurance regulation and risk control for commercial insurers by applying advanced technologies such as big data and AI. Currently, Shulianyikang’s services span across China, having served nearly 50 entities including healthcare security administrations, health commissions, and commercial insurance companies, as well as nearly 100 medical institutions, with its services covering a population of over 120 million.

The collaboration between Zhiyun Health and Shulianyikang represents a highly complementary alliance between two industry leaders. Zhiyun Health has accumulated substantial expertise in hospital coverage, chronic disease management models and data, as well as data modeling and mining capabilities. Meanwhile, Shulianyikang boasts a solid foundation and extensive experience in the practical application of cost-control and regulatory services for medical insurance and commercial insurance companies. The long-term management and diagnosis/treatment support based on big data for chronic diseases exhibit strong complementarity with the field of precision insurance regulation.

In this context, Zhiyun Health, which provides integrated solutions for chronic disease management both inside and outside hospitals, has entered into a strategic partnership with Shulianyikang, which offers intelligent solutions for medical insurance cost control and supervision. The collaboration between the two parties mainly includes the following aspects:

1. Assist Zhiyun Health in proactively engaging in pre-emptive cost-control supervision within its chronic disease management operations, ensuring alignment with current trends in medical insurance regulatory oversight;

2. Collaborate with Zhiyun to build broader and more efficient data models for medical insurance, and participate in the design of insurance products.

3. On the hospital data middle platform, mutual support enhances the efficiency of Zhiyun Hospital-side products and further unlocks the value of assisted diagnosis.

Prior to this collaboration, Zhiyun Health had also been committed to promoting the standardization of chronic disease data. On October 16, Zhiyun Health, together with China Electronics Data, the Chinese Medical Association, the National Healthcare Security Administration, and the Information Center of the National Health Commission, established the “Zhiyun Chronic Disease Big Data Center.”

Previously, Kuang Ming, CEO of Zhiyun Health, stated that most medical data within the industry remains siloed; even when interconnected, inconsistencies in data collection standards hinder the realization of its true value. As an industry leader with substantial expertise in chronic disease management, Zhiyun Health aims to collaborate with authoritative institutions to jointly establish and refine big data standards for chronic diseases and promote their application.

In terms of data middle platform operations, the platform established by Zhiyun Health across thousands of hospitals can serve as a key application for Shulianyikang, connecting data from different hospitals to help break down "data silos." Meanwhile, Shulianyikang’s healthcare big data platform can generate standardized data dimensions through the structuring of clinical data, thereby enhancing the efficiency of Zhiyun Health’s customized modules in overall diagnosis and treatment as well as full-cycle chronic disease management.

In Kuang Ming’s view, this strategic partnership with Shulianyikang will provide the latter with richer clinical information, enabling the construction of more precise user profiles and supporting proactive supervision of medical insurance. By leveraging Shulianyikang’s platform analytics based on medical insurance data, Zhiyun Health can enhance its chronic disease management capabilities from a higher-dimensional perspective, establish a standardized foundation for chronic disease data, and refine its chronic disease knowledge graph. This will facilitate better model optimization for chronic disease management strategies and identify risk points within the management process. Furthermore, it will expand the application scenarios of Zhiyun Health’s data, creating greater opportunities for leveraging medical data in insurance product design and insurance regulatory services.

Zhang Yanlong, CEO of Chengdu Shulianyikang Technology Co., Ltd. (Shulianyikang), stated that the integration of Shulianyikang’s cost-control algorithms for basic medical insurance with Zhiyun Health’s clinical big data has laid a solid foundation for both parties to explore future applications of data in basic medical insurance and commercial health insurance. Leveraging the detailed data from thousands of medical institutions accumulated by Zhiyun Health can enrich data dimensions and expand scenarios for medical insurance supervision, thereby strengthening regulatory oversight. Furthermore, in collaborations involving commercial health insurance, such granular institutional data will play a more significant role in product design, particularly in pricing and risk assessment, leading to a qualitative improvement in coverage scope. As commercial health insurance serves as a vital supplement to basic medical care and is currently receiving strong national policy support and encouragement, the collaborative efforts between the two companies in this sector are highly anticipated.