Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and WeDoctor Forge Strategic Collaboration on Internet, Big Data, and AI for Healthcare Innovation

Recently, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (hereinafter referred to as “Harvard Chan School”) and WeDoctor Holdings (hereinafter referred to as “WeDoctor”) signed a memorandum of understanding in Shanghai, China.

Against the backdrop of China’s vigorous promotion of the shift from a disease-centered approach to a people’s health-centered model, both parties agreed to establish a collaboration leveraging the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence to jointly advance primary healthcare, disease prevention, and health-focused poverty alleviation in China.

This Memorandum of Understanding shall have a term of five years. Through friendly consultations, both parties agree to collaborate on designing a healthcare service system based on the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model, featuring innovative incentive mechanisms, rational resource allocation, and support from internet platforms and big data. Leveraging artificial intelligence technologies, they will establish tools for general practitioners that provide training, AI-assisted diagnosis, health management, and treatment services. Furthermore, both parties will explore utilizing internet platforms for critical illness screening and prevention, and integrate cutting-edge big data analytics with regional medical and health big data to enhance the efficiency and quality of healthcare services.

On that day, Michelle A. Williams, Dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Liao Jieyuan, Chairman of WeDoctor, signed the aforementioned Memorandum of Understanding and reached a consensus on the implementation plan for their collaboration. Wu Zhaohui, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and President of Zhejiang University; Zhimin Ye, Professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard China Health Program; and Xu Zhengping, Vice Dean of the Zhejiang University School of Medicine and Dean of the Zhejiang University School of Public Health, among others, attended the signing ceremony.

Professor Ye Zhimin stated that the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has established this partnership with WeDoctor to deepen the School’s institutional commitment to promoting the health and well-being of the Chinese people through effective and scalable policy innovation, system design and implementation, and data science.

According to VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat), WeDoctor is a leading internet healthcare service provider in China. The platform has 110 million registered users, collaborates with 220,000 doctors and more than 2,700 hospitals, and drives healthcare services through information technology. In the future, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health will leverage its expertise in health policy and China’s healthcare reform, combining it with WeDoctor and its partners’ practices in China’s internet healthcare sector, to collaboratively improve healthcare and health outcomes in China.