Kuaiyi Launches Big Data-Powered Intelligent Triage Service to Help Patients Avoid Wrong Department Registrations

Technological advancements are continually reshaping patient expectations for healthcare, with a growing number of patients seeking more efficient, convenient, and comfortable medical services in their daily lives: accurately identifying the appropriate specialty, or even directly finding the “right doctor.”

In real-world medical service scenarios, patients often feel bewildered about which hospital to visit and which department to register with when experiencing physical discomfort. The confusion of “knowing the symptoms but not the disease” and “knowing the disease but not the appropriate department” is widespread.

Against this backdrop, Kuaiyi, a nationwide internet-based medical consultation service platform, adheres to its philosophy of providing users with more convenient and professional healthcare services via the internet. It continuously explores big data and technological innovations by integrating triage services into the appointment scheduling process, thereby enhancing the precision and utilization efficiency of medical services.

In March 2019, Jiao Yahui, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Medical Administration and Hospital Management under the National Health Commission of China, stated at a press conference that the development of medical services in China is at a critical stage of transition from “informatization” to “smartification.” Moving forward, the National Health Commission will continue to promote the development of informatization in the health sector, striving to make the construction of informatized and smart hospitals a key driver for the high-quality development of medical services.

In an exclusive interview with VCBeat, Bie Jia, Head of the Kuaiyi Business Division, stated that the internet and information technology have brought about disruptive changes across numerous industries, and the healthcare sector is no exception. What Kuaiyi is currently doing“Precision Triage”The service involves the gradual integration of new technologies, such as information analytics, artificial intelligence, and precision medicine, into healthcare delivery. This approach enables the rational allocation of medical resources and provides patients with precise triage and guidance services. It enhances the accuracy of patient registration, ensures timely diagnosis and treatment, reduces patients’ time and financial costs, minimizes the waste of medical resources, and mitigates doctor-patient conflicts and disputes, ultimately achieving a win-win outcome for both patients and healthcare providers.

For patients, registering an appointment is the first hurdle in seeking medical care; only by choosing the correct department can they receive appropriate treatment. Currently, large hospitals are gradually implementing a comprehensive appointment-based registration system for all non-emergency services. This means that, except for a very small number of slots reserved in some outpatient clinics for same-day appointments, all specialist and expert consultation slots are released exclusively through advance booking channels.

Of greater concern is that the specialized departments in large hospitals are highly subdivided, making it difficult for patients to determine which department they should visit before seeking care. Furthermore, some patients present with multiple concurrent symptoms rather than a single one. As most of these patients lack basic medical knowledge, they often choose a department based solely on their perceived symptoms, further exacerbating the difficulty in accessing appropriate medical care.

Recently, Kuaiyi’s customer service team received a plea for help: Aunt Liu, in her sixties, got up early and rushed from Shunyi District in Beijing to a top-tier tertiary hospital in the city to treat her chronic leg pain.

According to Aunt Liu, since October 2018, she has visited Peking University People’s Hospital, the General Hospital of the Military Region, and others, consulting departments including orthopedics, neurology, vascular surgery, and rheumatology and immunology. However, the treatment outcomes from each department were insignificant. With a look of helplessness, Aunt Liu said she was at a loss as to what to do. Cases like Aunt Liu’s are common; 80% of patients who should see pain specialists initially seek care in the wrong departments. By leveraging Kuaiyi’s precise triage service, which analyzes patient symptoms to accurately recommend hospitals with dedicated pain clinics, the time Aunt Liu spent rushing between hospitals was significantly reduced.

Currently, KuaiYi's precise triage service can provide the following services:

Intelligent Analysis for Precise Medical Consultation

When experiencing physical discomfort but unsure which department to visit, choose Kuaiyi’s precise triage service. The intelligent customer service system extracts extensive medical knowledge from a vast body of literature, processes and interprets it, and compares it with the patient’s reported symptoms to provide comprehensive professional guidance, enabling patients to ultimately achieve “precise appointment registration.”

Scientific Matching of Specialist Physicians

Kuaiyi’s precision triage service breaks away from the traditional approach of seeking experts based solely on renowned hospitals and famous doctors. Instead, it adopts a matching principle that prioritizes clinical conditions and disease-specific triage. By leveraging extensive data from previously treated patients, hospital specialty rankings, physicians’ areas of expertise, and their past diagnostic and treatment experiences, Kuaiyi matches patients with the most appropriate medical resources.

The greatest challenge is the mutual difficulty in matching doctors with patients. Regardless of whether an illness is major or minor, patients who cannot find a suitable physician tend to seek care from the most renowned specialists at the largest hospitals. This results in the invisible waste of specialist resources, leading to a situation where some critically ill patients with complex conditions, who have traveled across multiple regions, may be unable to secure appointments.

Many patients often book specialist appointments online in advance, only to rush to the hospital to pick up their registration numbers and undergo triage before being “shown out” of the consultation room by the specialist within minutes—because their condition falls outside the specialist’s area of expertise.

It is difficult for patients to secure an appointment, only to find that the assigned department and specialist are not a proper match. This undermines the patient experience and can easily trigger doctor-patient conflicts; for specialists, it represents an ineffective use and waste of consultation time.

Survey data indicate that 90% of patients visiting hospitals need to consult on which department they should register with before making an appointment. Furthermore, big data analytics from outpatient clinics in Beijing reveal that out of every 3.5 registration attempts, 2.5 are made to the wrong department, resulting in an effective utilization rate of appointment slots of less than 30%.

Kuaiyi’s Precision Triage Service addresses the mismatch between patients and physicians during appointment registration by enabling accurate triage and referral matching, thereby implementing tiered diagnosis and treatment. This service breaks down information asymmetry in doctor-patient communication, reasonably recommends corresponding medical resources based on patient needs, and provides clear and effective departmental guidance. It improves the accuracy of patient appointments and allows physicians to screen for suitable patients, with the potential to increase the effective utilization rate of outpatient appointment slots to over 60%. Consequently, this avoids the waste of high-quality medical resources, alleviates the supply-demand imbalance between doctors and patients, and promotes the rational allocation of medical resources.

From appointment registration to precise triage, Kuaiyi’s business and service reach are continuously expanding. The “Precise Triage” service launched by Kuaiyi is just the beginning.

Currently, Kuaiyi has jointly developed an intelligent AI triage system with JD.com and Tencent. In the future, Kuaiyi will collaborate with more hospitals, experts, and third-party partner institutions to refer patients to specialists with greater precision, thereby encouraging specialists to embrace tiered diagnosis and treatment and facilitate online referrals. Meanwhile, Kuaiyi will continue to optimize its medical knowledge graph and expand its application to a wider variety of medical scenarios, covering the entire patient journey. This represents Kuaiyi’s ultimate vision, which we believe is also a crucial component in the national implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment.