Alibaba Health Unveils Future Hospital Initiative at 2018 Primary Healthcare Innovation Summit, Launching Internet Hospitals and Cloud-Based Medical Consortiums

Conference: 2018 Summit on Innovative Practices in Primary Healthcare

Location: Radisson Plaza Hotel Huashengda, Hangzhou, Zhejiang

Presenter: Dong Yu, Director of the Future Hospital Division at AliHealth

Below is a summary of Dong Yu’s insightful perspectives by VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat):

I spent nearly 12 years at Alibaba Group, honing my expertise in e-commerce through roles spanning cross-border e-commerce, Tmall and Taobao, and Rural Taobao. Now, I have joined AliHealth to forge a second pillar of excellence.

Alibaba has proposed its “Double H” strategy, namely Health and Happiness. Internally, Alibaba refers to its operational approach as the “caterpillar track strategy,” whereby different business units take turns leading the charge at various stages, driving the entire conglomerate forward in a manner akin to a caterpillar track. Health and happiness will be the strategic focus of Alibaba for the next decade.

Alibaba Group excels at building platforms. Leveraging 19 years of accumulation on the Alibaba platform, AliHealth’s digital healthcare business boasts abundant platform resources, including 600 million real-name online users, over 14 million pharmaceutical and health products and services, more than 3,500 partner hospitals, over 150,000 pharmacies, and collaborative relationships with more than 60 government departments at the prefecture level or above.

AliHealth is now collaborating with Alibaba Cloud, DingTalk, Alipay, Tmall, and Taobao to integrate group resources and offer the Future Hospital Initiative to external partners.

We aim to provide integrated internet-based big data solutions for hospitals’ clinical practice, teaching and research, patient services, and hospital management by leveraging Alibaba’s cutting-edge technologies, products, and services in the internet and artificial intelligence sectors, in collaboration with the AliHealth ecosystem, to address hospital needs.

This comprehensive Internet-based solution can be summarized as follows:

Clinical & Academic:Leverage AI to Position Hospitals at the Forefront of Clinical Academia.

Hospital Management:Leveraging DingTalk's powerful intelligent office system to empower hospitals with efficient management tools.

Precision Patient Targeting, Brand Building:Leverage our internet hospital to identify precise patient cohorts for hospitals, thereby enhancing their brand image.

Credit-Based Medical Care:Leveraging Alipay’s credit and payment capabilities to provide patients with a convenient and inclusive healthcare environment.

Secure Storage and Computing Capabilities:Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s capabilities in cloud computing and big data to ensure hospital data security, enhance their protection levels, and facilitate the implementation of personalized services.

"Cloud Medical Consortium is a crucial means of linking healthcare institutions and achieving tiered diagnosis and treatment."

By bridging temporal, spatial, and information barriers, the Cloud Medical Consortium connects medical institutions across different regions and hierarchical levels. This facilitates the effective decentralization of high-quality medical resources, enhances the clinical skills of primary care physicians, and addresses the imbalance in healthcare resource distribution. Meanwhile, real-time sharing of medical information improves the accuracy and efficiency of physician consultations, while real-time doctor-patient interaction enables efficient management of complex and refractory cases.

In the cloud-based medical consortium, artificial intelligence will play a pivotal role. We are developing a clinical decision support system based on diagnostic practices, which distills the expertise of numerous specialists and applies it at the primary care level. This initiative aims to enhance the quality of medical services in grassroots healthcare settings, optimize the allocation of high-quality resources, and facilitate the intelligent upgrading of the medical consortium.

To date, we have collaborated with authoritative medical institutions to develop several products, including a big data platform for medical scientific research designed to advance academic studies; a scenario-based simulation platform for medical education aimed at training and assessing the clinical competencies of young primary-care physicians; and an intelligent imaging detection engine to assist radiologists in image interpretation, among others.

Let me provide a detailed introduction to the newly launched disease-specific clinical decision support engine for medication—AI Doctor for DiabetesIt integrates the years of experience of expert physicians with algorithms to generate diabetes medication recommendations for reference by primary care physicians. This approach effectively enhances the accuracy of pharmacotherapy for patients with specialized conditions, standardizes medication processes, thereby improving the professional competence of physicians in primary healthcare institutions and empowering medical consortiums.

Currently, we have begun deploying our diabetes-specific disease engine to medical consortia, and we will roll out more practical, intelligent clinical decision support engines in the future.

DingTalk is a familiar platform to many, widely adopted by hospitals and government agencies. It enables multiple functionalities, including mobile office operations, digital hospital management, information security, and intelligent resource scheduling.

Taking hospital management as an example,In terms of intelligent resource scheduling, through DingTalk, hospitals can achieve bed management, patient management, surgical anesthesia management, and pharmaceutical care management. For example, some of our hospitals are very large, with over 3,000 beds. How can we accurately and quickly match a suitable bed to a patient? By using DingTalk, we can access the patient's electronic medical records and then directly perform data matching through algorithms. This capability is highly popular among hospital nursing departments.

In terms of information security, everyone considers hospital data security to be of paramount importance due to its involvement with patient privacy. We have achieved full integration across hospitals; what if data were to leak? In fact, within the DingTalk system, we can perform real-time tracking and logging. Even if an employee resigns, they cannot take any data with them.

In terms of integration within medical consortiums, DingTalk has achieved three types of connectivity: connecting people, connecting systems, and connecting devices (IoT).

The first is the integration of interpersonal connectivity, which links medical consortiums from top to bottom, enabling seamless communication among all individuals within the same organizational structure. Meanwhile, it supports multiple functionalities, including two-way referrals, multidisciplinary consultations, remote consultations, mobile follow-ups, and patient education.

The second aspect is the integration between personnel and systems. With the assistance of DingTalk, functionalities such as physician training bases, mobile medical history queries, critical value alerts, mobile nursing, mobile ward rounds, and interactive scheduling can all be implemented.

The third aspect is the integration of people and objects. With hospital office equipment connected via the Internet of Things (IoT), truly smart office operations have been achieved.

Alibaba’s various apps boast a massive user base, which aligns highly well with internet healthcare services.

Patients do not need to install additional apps on their mobile phones; they can access our internet hospital directly through group-affiliated applications such as Tmall, Taobao, Alipay, and AliHealth. Meanwhile, through self-triage screening and intelligent triage, the hospital can also acquire more precisely matched patients.

Alibaba Internet Hospital can efficiently reach patients, provide them with precise services, and build a showcase platform for hospitals to promote their unique specialties. By partnering with Alibaba Internet Hospital, we can leverage IP technology to help hospitals attract more targeted patient groups.

For instance, when patients search for hospitals, we recommend nearby facilities based on their geographic location. Patients can query information such as the hospital’s patient intake capacity and the on-duty schedules of specialist physicians. Meanwhile, hospitals can perform triage after assessing the patient’s condition, which may even help increase patient visitation rates.

Alibaba has now launched an electronic health card based on Alipay. This real-person verified e-card facilitates patient access while ensuring real-name medical consultations. The electronic social security card and/or health card can serve as carriers for “Internet+” human resources and social security services and/or health services.

Alipay has now been integrated with the national medical insurance system, enabling users to handle registration, consultations, and payments at hospitals using just their mobile devices. This resolves the issue of non-real-name medical treatment resulting from lending one’s medical insurance card to others.

Additionally, we offer an official hospital lifestyle account, which can be found on the Smart Hospital homepage under “City Services” in Alipay. Appointment scheduling, consultations, payments, waitlist inquiries, report retrieval, and inpatient deposit payments are all easily managed with just a few taps, providing exceptional convenience. Furthermore, real-name and identity verification significantly reduce ticket scalping for appointments and ensure the security of users’ personal information.

Traditional healthcare delivery requires patients to queue at service windows for all procedures except consultations and examinations, resulting in repeated trips to payment counters and prolonged waiting times. Patients must prepare funds for medical visits in advance. This model can easily strain doctor-patient relationships and exposes hospitals to significant financial risks, such as those arising from non-real-name registration and insurance fraud.

Credit-based medical services: All procedures except for consultations, examinations, and medication pickup are conducted via mobile phone. Patients visit the hospital based on real-time queue status, reducing medical consultation time by over 50% and significantly enhancing patient experience and satisfaction.

Our calculations indicate that, leveraging Alipay’s robust payment capabilities, the average time spent on medical visits has been reduced by more than half. At hospitals that have integrated with both public medical insurance and commercial insurance systems and enabled password-free payments for out-of-pocket expenses, the billing system automatically deducts medical fees from the patient’s Alipay account within seconds upon bill confirmation, delivering a seamless “frictionless payment” experience.

Moreover, Alipay has integrated with commercial health insurance. After patients receive medical care at hospitals, all their diagnostic and treatment records and bills are displayed on Alipay, which then directly transmits the data to commercial insurers. As a result, patients can enjoy immediate deductible waivers upon leaving the hospital, making the process extremely fast.

Additionally, for patients with insufficient funds, their Sesame Credit score and Jiebei can provide an advance payment of 1,000 yuan. Currently, frictionless payment has achieved full coverage in registration fees, point-of-care payments, and pharmacy purchases.

Meanwhile, based on user creditworthiness, we can waive inpatient deposits to facilitate patient care and reduce the administrative burden on hospitals. Patients with a Zhima Credit score of 650 or above are exempt from paying deposits for hospitalization and for renting medical equipment such as wheelchairs, blood pressure monitors, and fetal heart rate monitors. This not only makes it more convenient for patients to seek medical treatment but also significantly lowers the management costs for hospitals.

Overall, Alipay now provides users with a convenient and inclusive healthcare environment.

Alibaba Cloud boasts formidable capabilities, maintaining a significant lead in cloud computing and big data. Currently, it stands as one of the global "3A" cloud providers, alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Therefore, leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing and big data capabilities, we can provide hospitals with data security, technical support, and personalized services.

Medical Data Security Assurance:Alibaba Cloud Advanced Security Solutions: Ensuring comprehensive security protection from the network and data layers to the application layer, significantly enhancing the internet security capabilities of applications.

High-Concurrency, High-Availability Architecture:A comprehensive database solution covering dual-machine hot standby, fault recovery, business monitoring, and data migration. A mature, full-suite distributed computing framework for middleware that provides application deployment capabilities and lightweight microservices solutions.

Big Data Enables Personalized Services:Intelligent consultation and health management services leverage big data analytics to predict user needs in real time, delivering personalized recommendations tailored to each individual.

We are currently collaborating with the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and Xinhua Hospital. We look forward to welcoming more partners to join AliHealth in co-building the hospitals of the future.