Tech Giant Lenovo Launches Standardized 'Hospital Internet+' Product Through Its Healthcare Subsidiary
Lenovo’s foray into the healthcare sector has long drawn significant attention.
On September 8, Lenovo Smart Healthcare will officially launch its “Hospital Internet+” product in Shanghai.
According to reporters from VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat), Lenovo Smart Healthcare was initially incubated within Lenovo Group for three years. In collaboration with its strategic partner, the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, it created the innovative “Wenzhou First Hospital Model,” which has received widespread acclaim. This April, it officially became an independent subsidiary under Lenovo. The newly launched “Hospital Internet+” products are designed specifically for B-side medical institutions to address hospital informatization challenges, marking a service upgrade from internal support to external offerings. Committed to becoming a leader in the healthcare informatization industry, Lenovo Smart Healthcare aims to drive industry transformation and thereby elevate the level of healthcare informatization in China.
Are the following scenarios also occurring in the public Grade 3A hospitals around you?
From the moment you step into the hospital, long queues form at every stage of the outpatient journey—from registration and payment to imaging, medication pickup, and admission procedures. The crying and coughing of pediatric patients are heart-wrenching; corridors are lined with beds, making it difficult even to walk through...
In fact, after waiting in line for hours and finally getting your turn, the doctor finishes the consultation in just two to three minutes. Long queues for registration, waiting, and payment, coupled with short consultation times, have led to the “three longs and one short” phenomenon in Grade A tertiary hospitals, thereby exacerbating doctor-patient tensions.
To this end, at the recently convened National Conference on Health and Wellness, President Xi Jinping delivered an important speech, reiterating the directive that healthcare reform should focus on advancing the development of fundamental healthcare systems. Tiered diagnosis and treatment, modern hospital management, universal health insurance, pharmaceutical supply assurance, and comprehensive regulation are recognized as China’s five fundamental healthcare systems.
Lenovo Smart Healthcare focuses on modern hospital management, providing consulting solutions for hospital process reengineering by leveraging the management achievements and practical experience of leading informatized hospitals in the industry.
Meanwhile, leveraging Lenovo’s IT information technology consulting capabilities, we provide customized process optimization and reengineering solutions for target hospitals. Our goal is to standardize, scientize, regulate, and streamline hospital operations, thereby enhancing operational efficiency, reducing labor costs, improving profitability, optimizing the utilization of medical resources, and elevating the quality of medical services.
“Across all industries, the healthcare sector has lagged relatively behind in its informatization process. Since the late 1970s, despite the in-depth application of information systems in specialized medical care and management, hospital informatization remains far behind compared with industries such as finance, telecommunications, and the internet. Meanwhile, the fragmented landscape of informatization initiatives and the competitive service market have presented Lenovo with an opportunity to capture a significant market share,” explained Robin.
As COO of Lenovo Smart Healthcare, Robin advocates for product standardization and a co-development partnership with hospitals. In addition to providing robust software systems and solutions, Lenovo Smart Healthcare simultaneously assists hospitals in building their own IT teams. The relationship between the enterprise and its clients should not be defined as a mere buyer-seller transaction, thereby avoiding the common criticism of “completing a project and walking away, only to initiate a new project when issues arise.”
Among the various projects currently underway, Lenovo Smart Healthcare has adopted this approach in its collaborations with hospitals for talent development: assisting hospitals in recruiting and training university graduates, who then join project development and implementation teams for practical experience. Upon successful completion of training, these individuals are transferred en masse to the hospitals to support future secondary development and post-launch operation and maintenance, thereby enhancing the hospitals’ overall informatics capabilities.
The newly released “Hospital Internet+” product is dedicated to facilitating the upgrade of hospitals’ internal information services toward external-facing services. The Hospital Internet+ cloud platform and its accompanying mobile app can rapidly enable a range of mobile internet functionalities for patient care, including appointment scheduling, online consultations, remote medical consultations, personal medical record access, and chronic disease management. Tailored to each hospital’s specific characteristics, the solution supports auxiliary features such as online top-ups, online payments, comprehensive medical knowledge bases, and self-assessment health tools. It also provides professional “turnkey” solutions for regional healthcare integration, two-way referral systems, remote multidisciplinary consultations, and smart home health management.
This innovative healthcare service model centers on patients by comprehensively addressing the entire care journey. It enables patients to intuitively view hospital appointment availability and select the most suitable physicians and consultation times based on their individual needs. Serving as the optimal entry point for initial consultations and triage, this model effectively promotes the development of a tiered diagnosis and treatment system and meets the primary healthcare needs of the general population.
“We define it as a ‘Pocket Hospital,’ deeply integrated into hospital operations and divided into two major functional areas: outpatient and inpatient care. By adopting a model that combines software and hardware, it enables both patients and physicians to monitor recent vital signs. This not only assists doctors in making more accurate diagnoses but also allows patients’ families to conveniently keep track of their loved ones’ recent health conditions.”
In addition to the mobile outpatient services, customized solutions are also provided for inpatients, offering a series of functional modules designed to streamline the hospitalization experience. These include inpatient admission slip inquiries, daily inpatient billing statements, ward surgical schedules, and historical hospitalization cost records.
“An integrated solution built on internet technologies such as cloud computing and big data provides patients, medical staff, and hospitals with information exchange products accessible anytime and anywhere, enabling mobile application scenarios including information sharing, doctor-patient interaction, diagnosis and treatment tracking, and management,” said Liang Qihui, CTO.
“It takes only 1–2 months to complete the integration between an internet hospital and a tertiary Grade A hospital.”
Therefore, in just two years, Lenovo Smart Healthcare has successfully entered multiple Grade A tertiary hospitals and supported the IT infrastructure development of four provincial-level healthcare platforms.
The remarkable operational efficiency is attributable to the team at Lenovo Smart Healthcare. Lin Lin, CEO of Lenovo Smart Healthcare, brings over 20 years of experience in IT industry consulting, software, and service management. As General Manager of Enterprise Services for Lenovo China, he has spearheaded the strategic partnership between Lenovo and The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University since 2013, and serves as Executive Vice Dean of the Joint Research Institute for Smart Healthcare. He previously held senior management positions at HP, BEA Systems, and Unisys.
CTO Liang Qihui holds an MBA and a Master’s degree from Fudan University. He is responsible for the architecture and development of cloud-based smart healthcare products. With over 12 years of experience in cloud computing R&D, implementation, and operations, he previously served as Head of Software Application R&D at Microsoft and Shanghai Bell. Prior to joining the company, he was General Manager of the Cloud Product and R&D Center at Shanghai Phicomm, where he led a large-scale R&D team.
“Although it was incubated within Lenovo Group, everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit,” said Robin. He is responsible for the overall spin-off, operations, and financing of the smart healthcare project. With over 15 years of experience in IT pre-sales, sales management, and investment, he serves as Lenovo’s Business Development and Investment Director.
“Lenovo Smart Healthcare was spun off to enable greater focus and foster stronger corporate development, as well as to meet its financing and investment needs. We are currently in advanced discussions with numerous investors, and progress has been promising.”
As the chain operation of hospitals has become a new trend in the development of the healthcare services industry, Lenovo Smart Healthcare has also proposed a smart healthcare solution optimized for hospital chains. In addition, corresponding solutions are available for smart health, smart public health, and hospital big data, promoting the coordinated reform of medical care, health insurance, and pharmaceuticals (the “Three-Medical Linkage”) to achieve whole-process health management.