Huazhuo Tech Unveils Hybrid Cloud Computing Platform at CHINC 2019

From April 12 to 14, 2019, the Chinese Hospital Information Network Conference (CHINC) officially kicked off in the beautiful Mountain City. Themed “Jointly Building Smart Hospitals, Sharing Intelligent Healthcare,” the conference aimed to convey new trends and concepts in the future development of smart healthcare and create opportunities for industry-wide information technology exchange.

As the earliest HIT vendor in China to implement full cloud migration for hospitals, Huazhuo Technology builds a data platform and application marketplace based on a hybrid cloud computing platform, and provides three major series of foundational applications. Its services cover five types of medical institutions: provincial Grade A tertiary hospitals, people’s hospitals, maternal and child health hospitals, hospital groups, and traditional Chinese medicine clinics. Meanwhile, it collaborates with partners to develop and enrich feature-specific applications characterized by intelligence, specialization, professionalism, and personalization.

At this conference, Li Tanwei, CEO of Huazhuo Information Technology, presented Huazhuo Technology’s latest R&D achievements in a presentation titled “Next-Generation Hospital Informatics Based on Hybrid Cloud Architecture.”

Huazhuo Hybrid Cloud Platform is a new generation of more secure, resilient, and intelligent healthcare hybrid cloud architecture proposed by Huazhuo Information Technology. It integrates cloud computing, distributed storage, and system management platforms to support the underlying infrastructure.

Currently, the underlying computational environment for the highly popular artificial intelligence and internet applications in hospitals remains at an early stage. The Huazhuo Cloud Computing Platform, released by Huazhuo Technology, enables the transformation of public cloud computing capabilities into a private cloud version.

Traditional cloud computing companies require approximately 100 devices to build a hybrid cloud environment for hospitals, entailing substantial investment. In contrast, Huazhuo Technology has achieved the industry’s smallest cluster hardware resource configuration, enabling deployment with only eight servers within ten minutes. This allows hospital IT departments to shift their focus from managing traditional IT infrastructure and operations to core business activities.

Huazhuo Medical App Market aims to make hospital system deployment as simple as installing apps on a smartphone. It enables straightforward operations for both software upgrades/iterations and rollbacks.

Huazhuo Medical App Market hosts numerous software developers, with Huazhuo itself serving as a specialized developer. These developers can publish their applications on the marketplace, such as outpatient management systems, nursing care systems, and electronic medical records (EMR).

After implementing the Platform Management Center, hospitals can purchase medical software from the application marketplace by registering an account, much like buying apps for a smartphone. The software is then deployed to the hospital’s on-premises environment via a hybrid cloud architecture. Subsequently, online upgrades and rollbacks can be performed. In the past, each hospital system upgrade might require downtime; however, with the Huazhuo Medical Application Marketplace, updates can be executed seamlessly without disruption.

During the use of cloud platforms, hospitals typically rely on basic functionalities such as databases, caching, and file storage. However, there is a greater need for business-oriented services, including laboratory testing services, physician order services, and medical record services. Therefore, Hangzhou Huazhuo Information Technology Co., Ltd. has developed common services into foundational components using a microservices architecture within its hybrid cloud technical framework.

Databases, caches, message queues, search engines, and other services are considered general-purpose services. Hangzhou Huazhuo Information Technology Co., Ltd. categorizes hospital business operations into three types:

First, clinical operations, such as disease codes, medication codes, and physician order services;

2. Management and Business Services: such as departmental wards, organizational structures, etc.;

Third, patient-related business services, such as patient indexing.

These services have been implemented by Huazhuo Technology in the form of microservices. The combination of these services forms a complete solution. Huazhuo Technology has added a gateway layer to these services, allowing users to access them directly through software such as HIS and PACS via the gateway.

Huazhuo Technology has transformed the way hospital software is computed, acquired, deployed, and upgraded, as well as the model for software development.

Huazhuo Technology’s integration begins with business integration. The workflows of physicians in outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings are integrated with those of nurses, differing only by the clinical scenario. Huazhuo Technology can customize outpatient interaction processes according to user needs. The second aspect of integration is the use of a single unified system across mobile devices, computers, and tablets. The third aspect is the integration of physician and nursing workflows; therefore, Huazhuo Technology has merged traditionally separate systems—such as Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), and ICU systems—into a unified platform termed “physician-nurse integration.”

The integrated medical-nursing workstation covers all aspects of clinical medical work, optimizes clinical workflows, enhances system usability, and maximizes the quality of healthcare in hospitals.

Huazhuo Technology has integrated hospital services related to medical imaging, such as ultrasound, radiology, and endoscopy, into a single platform called the Medical Imaging Platform. As a result, patients no longer need physical film prints and can directly access cloud-based films.

In terms of internet hospitals, Huazhuo Technology covers pre-consultation, during-consultation, and post-consultation services for patients through six major modules. These include remote diagnosis and treatment, medical alliances, medical consortia, and patient education, integrating central hospitals, primary care institutions, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance providers. With a patient-centric approach, the platform connects hospitals and healthcare professionals, streamlining the medical care process through internet-based tools such as mini-programs. Leveraging internet technologies and mobile terminals, the internet hospital platform establishes a 24/7 online outpatient service to meet patients’ comprehensive medical needs throughout the entire care journey.

The needs of healthcare institutions in terms of human resources, supplies, equipment, cost, efficiency, and communication are not purely isolated business modules. These tasks are closely related to many aspects of the work performed by medical professionals.

For example, the human resources (HR) system should serve as a fundamental module for all business systems. Therefore, Hangzhou Huazhuo Information Technology Co., Ltd. has established the HR system for medical institutions as the foundational module underlying its various business systems, integrating it across all operational platforms.

In terms of supplies, Huazhuo Technology has integrated the medical service processes and clinical attributes of consumables and equipment, connecting suppliers, hospitals, healthcare professionals, and patients. This integration achieves closed-loop management across the entire supply chain to meet financial requirements, while also enabling end-to-end traceability throughout the clinical care process, thereby ensuring patient safety.

In the fields of medical imaging and pathological images, Huazhuo Technology has conducted extensive AI practices. For instance, in the pathological system shown above, the automatic sorting and identification of bone marrow cells have achieved a box-selection accuracy of 91%, and it has been deployed and is operational at Shulan Hospital (Hangzhou).

Huazhuo AI Team researched named entity recognition technology for electronic medical records and secured third place in the Alibaba Tianchi Knowledge Graph Competition. This technology has been deployed in the clinical research data analysis platform at Shulan Hospital.

Extract symptoms from text using natural language processing techniques, and then search the knowledge graph for the most probable disease and department classifications.