DingTalk Empowers Over 6,000 Public Hospitals with Low-Code Platform Ahead of IPO Filing

“Rapidly building a graduate supervisor evaluation and appointment system through low-code development has resolved, at low cost, the previous issue of labor-intensive manual collection of materials.” This is a microcosm of a practice based on DingTalk by the Chief of the Teaching Management Department at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center.

The foundation for this system’s implementation was DingTalk’s low-code application development platform, “YiDa.” Since 2018, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center has adopted DingTalk as its unified portal, independently developing over 80 applications to serve more than ten core departments, including medical services, nursing, research, and teaching. These applications cover over 400 functional scenarios, such as workflow approvals. By leveraging “YiDa,” the hospital has reduced the development cycle for requirements that previously took half a month to less than one week, significantly enhancing application development efficiency.

Lou Yuanbo, Deputy Director of the Healthcare Industry Division at Alibaba’s DingTalk Business Unit, revealed that more than 6,000 public hospitals in China—including Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital of Fudan University, and Beijing Chest Hospital affiliated with Capital Medical University—have migrated their organizational structures and business operations to DingTalk. To date, DingTalk has provided digital services to over 3 million healthcare professionals.

“DingTalk aims to solve one major challenge in the healthcare industry each year,” said Lou Yuanbo, noting that this reflects DingTalk’s inherited DNA from Alibaba, which emphasizes foresight and pragmatic execution.

DingTalk has also put this philosophy into practice through concrete actions. In 2018, DingTalk advocated for a safer and more efficient new way of working, aiming to help hospitals transition into the era of mobile healthcare. In 2019, DingTalk emphasized “organizational digitalization,” building a digital organizational and collaborative foundation for hospitals. Guided by the principle of “Five Online Presences,” it empowered the healthcare industry and extended hospitals’ organizational capabilities through digitalization. That same year saw the emergence of numerous digital medical consortia, medical alliances, and medical research platforms based on DingTalk. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic response, this “digital organization” system played a significant role, enabling health authorities to rapidly coordinate hospitals, disease control centers, and primary care physicians, while accessing real-time data and intelligence from the frontline.

Since 2020, DingTalk has championed “Smart Hospital Management,” driving the development of an integrated tripartite smart hospital framework.

According to the “Graded Evaluation Standard System for Smart Hospital Management (Trial),” smart management encompasses ten major categories, including medical and nursing management, human resources management, financial and asset management, and equipment and facility management, covering 33 scenarios. “For each specific smart management scenario, there are partners with specialized expertise; however, their solutions remain disconnected and fragmented. DingTalk aims to build a digital platform that collaborates with more ecosystem partners to jointly advance the development of smart hospital management.”

It was also during the gradual deepening of this development that DingTalk identified the issue of “management adaptation” in hospitals’ smart management. Hospital administration is a practice-oriented discipline; variations in geography, resources, and leadership styles give rise to diverse management approaches and outcomes. DingTalk believes that, within the overarching framework of the Graded Evaluation Standard System for Smart Hospital Management (Trial), a flexible application tool is needed to accommodate the distinct management philosophies of different administrators.

At this juncture, DingTalk, addressing the pain points in smart hospital management, found itself perfectly aligned with low-code technology, which was beginning to demonstrate promising development prospects. The year 2021 is widely regarded as the “Year One of Low-Code.” Driven by multiple factors—including substantial financing rounds secured by related companies abroad, supportive policies in China, and the iteration window for traditional software technologies—low-code has gradually begun to unlock its value in the healthcare industry.

As for the underlying logic behind this surge in popularity, Lou Yuanbo believes it is as follows: The wave of digital transformation is irreversible, leading to a surge in demand for application development across various industries and scenarios, while programmer resources are extremely scarce. Lowering the barrier to development has become one of the key ways to address this dilemma, by modularizing, visualizing, and customizing previously repetitive development capabilities, thereby enabling non-developers to participate in the development process. This approach not only alleviates resource scarcity but also reduces development time and costs.

Following Phase 1.0, the “Era of Borrowing,” which involved comprehensive learning from foreign countries and established an information system centered on electronic medical records (EMR), and Phase 2.0, the “Era of Interconnectivity,” which established a comprehensive system for hospital data assetization and interface standardization, healthcare IT (HIT) construction has entered Phase 3.0—the “Era of Full-Scenario Digitalization.” DingTalk aims to return the authority over digitalization initiatives to hospitals, empowering not only the Information Technology Department but also frontline hospital staff.

Lou Yuanbo introduced that DingTalk advocates for low-code development. On one hand, it can reduce the workload of hospital IT departments, serving as a powerful tool to handle numerous fragmented requests, thereby enabling IT staff to focus on core hospital system tasks such as data processing and interoperability among business systems. On the other hand, it aims to enhance the digital awareness of frontline operational staff, with the goal of making low-code applications as ubiquitous as Word and Excel as digital productivity tools in the future. “Applications can be built wherever there is a scenario. The essence of low-code is similar to Excel, involving create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations on forms, but it is more flexible and intuitive than Excel.”

“Enable hospital applications to evolve with changes in business and management, while keeping data centers and business objects stable despite shifting requirements.” DingTalk predicts that this will also become the dominant digital paradigm for a long time to come.

The implementation of low-code solutions in hospitals has not been without its challenges. Lou Yuanbo briefly outlined several issues he encountered during the practical application process.

First, hospitals lack understanding of low-code security, leading to a certain degree of bias in data security."Should hospitals adopting low-code platforms migrate to the cloud? Can data security be ensured?" These are common questions raised by hospitals when engaging with low-code vendors. Leveraging Alibaba’s years of accumulated security expertise, DingTalk provides hospitals with a comprehensive "security management system" that integrates environmental security, account security, and behavioral security.

Secondly, hospitals often misunderstand low-code application scenarios, believing that low-code platforms cannot meet the needs of complex applications.Lou Yuanbo believes that while low-code platforms can be used to develop customized applications for core hospital information systems to meet complex requirements, the associated costs are prohibitively high and therefore unnecessary when existing information systems already suffice. Low-code solutions and traditional hospital information systems share a synergistic relationship where “1+1>2”; their primary role is to address fragmented, dynamic, and personalized long-tail application needs.

Lou Yuanbo recalled that a hospital once spent RMB 1 million to purchase a comprehensive epidemic prevention and epidemiological investigation system. In reality, however, the hospital only needed certain modules of the system, and usage frequency was low, resulting in an unnecessary drain on its financial resources. In such scenarios, low-code vendors can deconstruct the hospital’s specific requirements and implement tailored solutions using low-code development platforms.

Then, while low-code platforms are easy to get started with, the quality of low-code products varies.“YiDa is suitable for all frontline workers interested in digitalization.” Generally, most people can meet their own application needs through simple training. For example, at Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, in addition to the information department developing low-code applications, the hospital also encourages medical staff in various departments to self-study low-code development. Currently, nearly every functional department in the hospital has a DingTalk administrator to promote the use of DingTalk. By using simple “drag-and-drop” operations, they have built more than 20 low-code applications, flexibly meeting the daily informatization needs of a large number of frontline business operations.

However, to transform low-code applications into marketable products, one must possess the product manager’s ability to discern user needs, concretizing, abstracting, and standardizing ambiguous requirements. Additionally, knowledge of IT, APIs, and related fields is essential to develop competitive low-code products.

Currently, the low-code market landscape is highly fragmented, comprising native low-code vendors, application-development-focused providers, and SaaS or cloud companies transitioning into the low-code space. While low-code products share common underlying logic and functionalities, each possesses distinct advantages; for instance, DingTalk’s “YiDa” platform excels in data openness and data throughput capacity.

Taking the epidemic-related population mobility survey system built for the Health Commission of a major Chinese province using DingTalk’s “YiDa” as an example, this system needed to simultaneously filter data on inbound and outbound population flows within the province. Although the form functionality was relatively simple, the volume of data was enormous. This posed a significant challenge to the cloud resource scheduling capabilities and platform stability of the low-code platform. Built on Alibaba Cloud, DingTalk benefits from a series of advantages provided by Alibaba Cloud, including reduced operational and maintenance costs, enhanced information security, and improved research and development efficiency.

DingTalk’s open capabilities are also worth noting. Since its launch in 2014, DingTalk has accumulated more than 3,000 API interfaces, enabling rapid integration with other systems and hardware. This facilitates bidirectional exchange of business data between systems, streamlines business processing workflows, and promotes seamless integration among heterogeneous systems.

Beyond low-code application development services, DingTalk also aims to become the most vibrant application development platform in the industry.In terms of open capability development, DingTalk launched “DingTalk Da” in May 2021—a unified development platform featuring low-code development., functioning as a low-code application marketplace that integrates DingTalk’s low-code ecosystem products such as YiDa, ChuanYun, and Jiandaoyun. By offering a wider range of templates, case studies, and solutions, it enables business personnel—beyond traditional R&D staff—to directly participate in application development, thereby meeting enterprises’ scenario-specific and industry-specific digitalization needs and accelerating organizational and business digital transformation. Enterprises and individual developers can purchase these offerings on demand.

On December 29, 2022, the DingTalk “7.0” product launch event officially unveiled DingTalk version 7.0. Ye Jun, President of DingTalk, stated that there were already 5 million low-code applications on the platform, and he projected that within approximately one year, the number of digital applications developed on DingTalk—including both low-code and full-code solutions—would exceed 10 million.

In addition to medical institutions, the pharmaceutical industry is another major sector served by low-code platforms in healthcare. “While business models may differ, the underlying needs do not.” DingTalk’s “YiDa” has also made strategic inroads into pharmaceutical R&D, drug distribution, retail pharmacy, and drug manufacturing.

According to VCBeat’s preliminary overview of participants in China’s low-code sector, there are currently few enterprises focusing specifically on healthcare scenarios, such as Weibaobao, Coordinate Software, and Fuxin Technology. Some domestic healthcare IT companies have also developed low-code platforms to enhance their internal development efficiency. In addition, certain vertical low-code providers offer manufacturing and production services to pharmaceutical companies.

Lou Yuanbo introduced that traditional industries like healthcare have established rules, and without the impetus of external factors such as policies and environment, the motivation for transformation is not strong. Overall, the application of low-code in the healthcare industry is still in its very early stages. He believes that, like other digital technologies, low-code will first spread across various industries, and after achieving certain development in data accumulation, market awareness cultivation, and demand exploration, it will gradually flourish in various niche markets.