Behind the Scenes of Yinchuan’s Internet Hospital Regulatory Platform: An Exclusive Interview with Wang Chuan, Director of Yinchuan Big Data Service Administration

Since April, discussions on “Internet + Healthcare” have been continuous, with frequent policy releases and successive inspections by national leaders.

From May 20 to 22, Sun Chunlan, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council, conducted field research in Zhejiang Province on the work undertaken by Wuzhen Internet Hospital in the area of “Internet + Healthcare.” She emphasized the need to deepen comprehensive reforms of public hospitals, promote the development of “Internet + Healthcare,” and encourage private healthcare provision, so as to deliver high-quality, efficient, and convenient health services to the public.

This underscores the state’s high level of attention to “Internet + Healthcare.” In addition to focusing on the development of “Internet + Healthcare,” regulatory oversight has not been neglected.

More than ten days ago, Yinchuan City launched an internet-based regulatory platform. This platform employs a combination of “automated verification and alerts plus manual intervention” to conduct real-time supervision and control over the operational compliance of internet diagnosis and treatment platforms, hospital qualifications, and physician registration. It specifically targets core business activities within the diagnostic and therapeutic process, including online consultations, triage, prescription issuance, remote consultations, medical record documentation, and medication delivery.

How can internet regulatory platforms achieve end-to-end oversight, and how can medical big data be effectively integrated? What are the implications for the entire “Internet + Healthcare” industry? VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) conducted an in-depth investigation, featuring exclusive interviews with Wang Chuan, Director of the Yinchuan Big Data Service Administration Bureau—the lead agency—and Liu Chunyang, Deputy General Manager of the Regional Healthcare Information System Product Division at Peking University Medical Information Technology (PKU MedInfo), the implementing organization.

Since 2017, leveraging the policy advantages of “pilot implementation” under the Inland Open Economy Pilot Zone, Yinchuan has actively innovated its institutional mechanisms in line with policy guidelines, embarking on an exploratory path for “Internet + Healthcare.”Following the entry of 29 internet healthcare companies into Yinchuan, the total number of physicians registered and filed with these internet hospital platforms has reached 20,583, cumulatively serving over 7 million patients.

Under the demands of industrial clusters and industry development, the introduction of regulatory measures is imperative. First, to ensure comprehensive data oversight, all internet hospitals are required to deploy their data services at the Yinchuan Big Data Center, facilitating unified data management.

Wang Chuan told reporters that the construction of the regulatory platform for internet hospitals enables whole-process, comprehensive, and fully automated supervision through three levels: pre-event reminders, in-process controls, and post-event traceability. Control is exercised through a combination of automatic verification alerts and manual intervention. Guided by the principles of “whole-process coverage, precision management, performance orientation, and standardization,” the regulatory platform leverages information technology to achieve whole-process, comprehensive, and fully automated online real-time supervision.

This is also one of the approaches Yinchuan has adopted to build smart healthcare and serve more citizens. Wang Chuan stated that smart healthcare is not merely an issue of informatization; rather, after the completion of informatization infrastructure, it is further empowered by integrating additional high-quality medical resources into the digital platform.

Taking the onboarding of internet hospitals in Yinchuan as an example, these platforms not only provide services and content such as online diagnosis and treatment, but also help local governments form a new industrial economic cluster. Taking Haodf Online, the first platform to establish its presence in Yinchuan, as an example, it contributed a total of 22 million yuan in tax revenue to the Yinchuan government last year, demonstrating its role in driving the city’s industrial and economic development.

“Both service sectors and the industrial economy require a set of effective regulatory measures. It was in response to this pressing need that a series of policies were formulated and introduced,” said Wang Chuan, Director of the Yinchuan Big Data Management Service Bureau.

While there is a strong demand for the regulation of internet hospitals, the requirements are exceptionally stringent. This differs from previous regulatory policies, as it necessitates addressing multifaceted challenges spanning regulatory innovation, technology, inter-departmental coordination, security, and the diversification of business models.

Following the completion of collective signing in March last year, Yinchuan City began planning the launch of the entire regulatory platform in April and collaborated with Peking University Medical Information to build it.

From the construction, integration, and utilization of the “Smart Healthcare” data platform, to the planning and development of a five-tier healthcare system, and further to the clustering of “Internet + Healthcare” enterprises and the establishment of an “Internet + Healthcare” hub, Peking University Medical Information Technology (PKU MIIT) has been deeply involved in every stage of Yinchuan’s internet healthcare development.

According to Liu Chunyang, leveraging its professional technical capabilities, customer base, and Peking University Healthcare’s extensive medical resources, and under the guidance of the Yinchuan Municipal People’s Government, the Municipal Big Data Management Service Bureau, and the Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission, PKU Healthcare IT participated in the design and development of the Yinchuan Internet Hospital Platform, jointly creating the Yinchuan Internet Hospital Supervision Platform.

In his view, the regulation of internet-based physicians must leverage information technology and data verification to intelligently identify violations and thereby establish regulatory rules. This differs from the oversight of traditional brick-and-mortar medical institutions, as all diagnostic and therapeutic services are delivered entirely online, with the sector evolving at a rapid pace. With numerous new business models being managed exclusively through data controls, the core challenge for regulators is to determine how to assess the compliance and quality of medical services via data analysis, and to effectively prevent violations embedded within business processes.

Regardless of their size, internet hospitals currently handle a wide array of services. At this stage, where online diagnosis and treatment processes lack uniformity and standardization, regulatory platforms must integrate with the diverse and complex operations of all internet healthcare platforms. Furthermore, these regulatory platforms must possess “evolutionary” capabilities to adapt to continuously changing and newly added business functions.

To address these challenges, under the leadership of the Big Data Bureau, the Peking University Health Information Technology team, led by Liu Chunyang, primarily completed the task through the following steps:

First, we engaged in in-depth discussions with internet companies to gain a thorough understanding of the business operations of digital health enterprises. We identified key nodes within their systems and integrated these insights into the design of data collection, thereby updating the design.

Second, millisecond-level data collection has been technically achieved; as soon as data is generated on the enterprise platform, it immediately appears on the regulatory platform.

Third, achieve open data. He discovered that certain business operations or data were not covered by the regulatory platform, which was certainly due to issues in the integration between enterprises and our system. Through coordination with the Big Data Bureau and the Health and Family Planning Commission, enterprises were required to fully disclose the entire diagnosis and treatment process. This helped the regulatory platform identify and troubleshoot issues in its operational mechanisms.

In terms of security risks, the overall information security design of the Yinchuan Internet Hospital Supervision Platform addresses the actual and potential security risks faced by internal business-related information, business information exchanged with external entities, and service information released to the public. By analyzing the various types of information requiring protection and comprehensively considering the system’s acceptable level of risk, security objectives corresponding to the security requirements of each information system are established. A security model and an information security protection system are then developed to achieve these objectives, thereby attaining an optimal balance among risk, security, and investment.

In addition to addressing key challenges, the regulatory platform launched by Peking University Health Information Center features the following highlights. First, it delivers high performance by adopting an auto-scaling microservices architecture, which decouples data ingestion, validation, processing, analysis, and visualization into separate services that are organically integrated. Automated service deployment and dynamic scaling are achieved through an internal performance monitoring mechanism.

Intelligent supervision has also been implemented. Supervisors can adjust regulatory items and judgment thresholds in response to updates in regulatory policies, enabling rapid responsiveness. This achieves real-time, automated, and comprehensive monitoring requirements. Based on big data analytics models, the system reorganizes and redefines key dimensions such as medical authenticity, clinical practices, medication rationality, diagnostic and treatment quality, and healthcare expenditures. By setting differentiated thresholds, it enables automated intelligent supervision and early warning for compliant diagnosis and rational drug use.

The launch of a high-performance, high-concurrency regulatory platform that embodies the flexibility and scalability of a data exchange platform not only tightens oversight over internet healthcare enterprises by introducing clear regulatory policies and defining red lines for internet-based operations, but also promotes the standardization and normalization of the internet healthcare industry from both technical and service perspectives.

Wang Chuan, Director of the Yinchuan Big Data Management and Service Bureau, stated: “Our efforts to drive industry development can be approached from both technological and service perspectives. Technologically, we can promote the standardization of online internet-based diagnosis and treatment practices. This is highly beneficial for regulatory platforms, offline physical hospitals, physicians, patients, and regulatory authorities alike.”

The second is to promote the structuring and standardization of our health and medical data. This is because online treatment currently takes complex and diverse forms, including voice, text, and video. Platforms like Tencent Miying require an integrated platform such as ours.

From a service perspective, Wang Chuan aims to integrate this internet-based treatment platform with offline hospitals to create a new model of medical consortiums. This approach will facilitate the decentralization of high-quality medical resources, empower physical hospitals, enhance physicians’ diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities, and enable citizens to benefit from affordable care while enjoying the dividends of “Internet + Healthcare.”

Wang Chuan believes that regulatory oversight of internet healthcare companies needs to be strengthened, but this does not mean a sweeping crackdown on internet enterprises. This is because internet healthcare has a distinct characteristic: greater participation from the consumer side (C-end).

Therefore, Liu Chunyang expressed the hope that “in the future, regulatory oversight should be integrated into a public platform, granting the public the right to information and enabling them to provide feedback on the platform. Although enterprise platforms, Big Data Bureaus, and physical hospitals all serve as regulatory entities, this constitutes an incomplete framework. Only by incorporating the end users—the patients—can the regulatory system be considered comprehensive.”

The Yinchuan Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission will further strengthen the management and supervision of telemedicine services provided by internet hospitals and online information platforms established by third-party institutions.

In the future, with the continued operation of the internet hospital regulatory platform, industry analysis based on data from the regulatory platform, Yinchuan’s industrial agglomeration, big data, and smart healthcare will generate greater commercial value.