Digital platform to link Chinese hospitals, enable remote diagnosis and reform health care services

China’s state-run health care system can benefit from the adoption of new technologies which promise to help push down costs while also improving the quality of patient care, with the advantages of digitisation to be more fully leveraged as more hospitals come online.

Shanghai Century Hengkang Medicial (Consulting), operator of a government-backed telemedicine organisation, said it aims to play a leading role in promoting digital in the health care sector by launching a new online platform for hospitals in Shanghai on Wednesday.

The platform, empowered by cloud collaborative computing, can better align hospitals across the nation and overseas to assist remote diagnosis, enable sharing of digital records and conduct online training of clinical staff, according to the company.

The platform will reach 350 Chinese hospitals this year and cover more than 3,000 public hospitals, or 70 per cent of the nation’s total by 2022, according to the operator.

“The cloud collaborative system allows each hospital data storage and retrieval, and the ability to share information with other hospitals on the platform, appealing to those hospitals that are reluctant to hand over their data to a third party cloud operator,” said Ji Kang, chairman of Century Hengkang.

Century Hengkang manages the daily operation of the technology-driven platform for the nation’s dominant telemedicine organisation, whose members including 300 major hospitals in the nation.

On Wednesday, Jiaxing No 1 People’s Hospital in Zhejiang province became the first to sign a contract to use the platform and set up a designated health centre with remote diagnosis facilities.