Medical Equipment Management Challenges? This AI + Big Data Company Serves 400+ Institutions and Manages Nearly RMB 100 Billion in Assets

In 2016, when nearly all entrepreneurs were complaining about the “capital winter,” Shulian Yixin quietly secured a tens-of-millions RMB Series A financing round from Sequoia China and Legend Star. At that time, Shulian Yixin had been in operation for only two years.

In fact, Shulian Yixin has long been favored by capital markets, securing strategic investments from top-tier industry players such as Legend Star and Meinian Onehealth shortly after its establishment in 2015. What accounts for the substantial support Shulian Yixin has garnered? Ma Xiao, Founder and CEO of Shulian Yixin, told VCBeat: “I don’t think there is any particular reason; it comes down to three points:Broad Direction, Cross-disciplinary TeamandGrowth Rate。”

Shulian Yixin is a medical big data company dedicated to quantifying the full lifecycle of medical devices. The company’s vision is “Quantifying Devices, Benefiting Lives”. As a demonstration application unit of the National Health and Family Planning Commission–University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Institute for Medical and Health Big Data, and as a vice-president unit of the China Association of Health Industry Enterprise Management, Shulian Yixin has been committed to optimizing resource allocation in the healthcare industry through big data, thereby supporting the innovation and development of medical engineering in China.

When discussing the initial reasons for choosing “Healthcare + Big Data“Looking back on that direction,” Ma Xiao recalled, “healthcare is a sunrise industry, and the advent of the big data era has endowed it with new possibilities. Moreover, the level of equipment management in the healthcare sector directly impacts hospital operational efficiency and patient safety. Therefore, we believed at the time that connecting medical devices via the Internet, combined with professional data analytics, would inevitably bring about a transformation in this industry.”

Medical equipment, as a crucial support for hospitals to conduct medical care, scientific research, and teaching, is one of the symbols of a hospital's comprehensive strength. With the advancement of medical technology in China, major hospitals are continuously introducing advanced medical equipment. According to statistics, there are more than 28,000 specialized hospitals and nearly 1 million medical institutions in China. The total value of the equipment in these medical institutions exceeds 3 trillion yuan. Therefore, it is extremely important to manage medical equipment effectively.

However, over the years, hospitals and healthcare institutions have failed to identify an effective management approach, resulting in significant deficiencies in medical equipment asset management.

First, the wide variety and dispersed distribution of hospital equipment increase management complexity. Currently, many hospitals still rely on primitive manual bookkeeping for asset management, which is inefficient. Traditional information software fails to fundamentally resolve these issues, resulting in incomplete records that impair cost accounting across various departments.

Secondly, equipment management in many hospitals is arbitrary, with weak awareness of maintenance. Each department applies to purchase a large number of major medical devices annually based on operational needs, yet lacks rigorous feasibility assessments for these acquisitions. This results in significant equipment idleness, low utilization rates, and resource waste. Moreover, hospitals lack precise control over equipment repair and maintenance costs, and the efficiency of after-sales service remains unsatisfactory.

To address the pain points in the lifecycle management of hospital medical equipment, Shulian Yixin has launchedVBInsightandMedInfo Cloud ServicesTwo Core Products: Delivering Precise and Efficient Medical Equipment Asset Management Services to Hospital Users, Enhancing Internal Equipment Management Efficiency.

What is Yixin Jingpan? Ma Xiao offered this vivid explanation: “Yixin Jingpan is akin to assigning a unique digital identity to each medical device, enabling it to connect to the network and ensuring that its management lifecycle can be accurately traced.”

What appears to be a simple task of labeling actually requires, at the data level, the management of thousands of brands, hundreds of thousands of models, and tens of millions of unique device identifiers, while also meeting industry regulatory requirements and hospital asset management needs. Without the support of underlying data classification and foundational data platforms, any hospital seeking to establish an accurate equipment ledger would incur substantial costs.

Yixin Jingpan offers highly standardized services, providing professional inventory tools with image-text correspondence for ease of use. It ensures dynamic updates of equipment asset data and real-time visibility into profit and loss status. It is reported thatShulian Yixin Possesses the World's Largest Database of Basic Information on Medical Devices, applied to over one million equipment-related images, achieving an equipment image recognition rate of up to 96%. Through machine learning and automated matching, the cost of asset registration and inventory is reduced to one percent of that of manual operations, while also delivering greater precision and avoiding human errors.

Yixin Cloud Service is currently the only medical equipment management service cloud platform in China that integrates mobile internet, cloud computing, big data, and professional management services.By leveraging mobile internet technologies to dynamically link cloud-based archives, we provide management services covering the entire lifecycle of medical equipment, ensuring full traceability of information. Meanwhile, by automatically quantifying the fault warranty process, we enhance equipment operational efficiency and achieve precise profiling and efficient collaboration among personnel, equipment, and materials throughout the equipment management process.

By effectively quantifying and mining static and dynamic equipment data, high-dimensional correlations between equipment category characteristics and hospital operational characteristics can be established. This enables effective scoring and oversight of the service process, thereby improving service quality across all participants in the industry chain and reducing safety risks associated with medical devices.

Meanwhile, algorithmic models can provide healthcare institutions with data-driven decision analytics for equipment asset disposal, thereby reducing the risks associated with manual decision-making. By addressing pain points through scenario-based data and enhancing efficiency via algorithmic models, Shulian Yixin has effectively realized the application of AI in medical equipment.

For instance, in the area of failure prediction, Shulian Yixin selects 10 basic features, including brand, category, hospital, department, and maintenance records. Through Cartesian product, feature discretization, and feature clustering, it screens out 429 features to predict impending equipment failures, achieving an accuracy rate of 92.87%. Moreover, the accuracy continues to improve as the data volume increases. By leveraging failure prediction and precise services, the efficiency of hospital equipment management processes is enhanced.

When evaluating the team at Shulian Yixin, Ma Xiao often remarks, “I’ve always felt that I’m the least impressive member of our team; everyone else is more capable than I am.” Ma Xiao positions himself as the glue holding this cross-disciplinary team together, a role closely tied to his past experiences.

Before founding Shulian Yixin, Ma Xiao was the founder and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Chengdu Shulian Mingpin, a professional big data solutions company that achieved a market valuation exceeding RMB 2 billion within four years of its establishment. In addition, he serves as the Deputy Director of the Big Data Research Center at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He entered the big data field under the mentorship of Professor Zhou Tao, a leading big data expert in China, and has dedicated over a decade to serving the telecommunications and healthcare industries. Clearly, Ma Xiao is a versatile professional with expertise in both healthcare and data, laying a solid foundation for the establishment of Shulian Yixin.

And the "god-tier teammate" Ma Xiao referred to,They are big data scientists and medical equipment experts from top international institutions such as GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Sinopharm Group, Alibaba, Alipay, Tencent, and Ruijin Hospital.

Co-CEO Qiu Tao, is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a senior expert in the healthcare industry, and the founder of Huayikang. He served at GE Healthcare in China and the United States for 15 years, gaining extensive experience across the entire value chain including operations, R&D, sales, marketing, and service. Having undergone rigorous training in two core programs—operational leadership and commercial leadership—he possesses profound industry expertise in the field of medical devices.

CDO (Chief Data Officer) Yang Zimo, who was awarded the Outstanding Winner title (ranked first globally) in the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) of the 2011 Mathematical Contest in Modeling. She led projects such as precision email marketing for Alibaba Group (Taobao), offline Taobao search and recommendation services (Koubei.com), and personalized homepages for Alipay, and holds multiple algorithm patents within Alibaba.

CPO (Chief Product Officer) Duanmu Heng, formerly served as a Project Manager in Apple’s Global Developer Relations, Asia Strategic Development, and Education Marketing departments. During his tenure at Tencent, Duanmu Heng oversaw the product lines for Weibo and the QQ mobile client.

CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Sun Xi, formerly served as Sales Director at Shenzhen SonoScape Medical Corp., where he was responsible for establishing and managing the national sales and marketing systems. He also previously served as GE Healthcare’s Ultrasound Manager for South China. He founded Shenzhen Qianhai Linghang Network Technology Co., Ltd., dedicated to building an ecosystem for dental medical services, and secured strategic investment.

“We are a group brought together by a shared mission. Each of us has an impressive track record, complete with its own share of accolades, and some have already achieved financial independence. What unites us is our common belief in the power of data to transform industries, approaching this endeavor as both a morally rewarding cause and a viable business opportunity.”

After three years of meticulous strategic planning, Shulian Yixin has established a nationwide medical equipment asset management map with an initial scale. Its business operations now span 21 provinces and municipalities across China, covering nearly 400 public hospitals and chain healthcare institutions.

From governments at all levels and industry associations to leading hospitals and benchmark institutions across the country, Shulian Yixin has gradually established its influence within the healthcare sector. Its data solutions are currently adopted by 35% of China’s Top 100 hospitals and 15.6% of Grade A tertiary hospitals, managing over 400,000 medical devices with a total asset value approaching RMB 100 billion.

But the potential of Shulian Yixin extends far beyond this. According to Ma Xiao, the company plans to launch additional data solutions focused on full lifecycle management of medical equipment, helping hospitals improve both equipment management efficiency and asset utilization rates.

“With the acceleration of healthcare reform, the expansion of medical consortia, and the deepening of tiered diagnosis and treatment, improving the operational efficiency of medical institutions is bound to become the next critical necessity. Our company focuses on the entire lifecycle of medical equipment—from acquisition to disposal—continuously achieving in-depth quantification of process nodes and human-machine interactions. We identify pain points within specific application scenarios and leverage data-driven solutions to address them; this constitutes our core competitive advantage.”

“A defibrillator must be charged to its rated capacity of 360 joules to effectively save lives. Failure to ensure effective management and maintenance of such equipment constitutes a disregard for human life. We strive to minimize patient harm resulting from improper medical device management.”

From our conversation with Ma Xiao, we can see his confidence in Shulian Yixin and the industry as a whole. VCBeat will continue to closely follow this sector, hoping to witness more companies delivering unique surprises in the future.