How could a country keep a population of 1.4 billion people healthy when the system struggles
with corruption, lack of resources and an aging population?
China is going to be the undisputed technological superpower of the future, but if they want
to solve these problems, they’ll inevitably need to bring their technological forte to
healthcare as well.
Today, the Chinese healthcare landscape is grim.
Understaffed and overcrowded hospitals, pharma corruption, and a healthcare ecosystem ill-equipped
to deal with its enormous population.
But it’s not just the population that the system can’t keep up with.
It’s also the size of the country itself.
As the world’s fourth largest country, China has many under-developed, rural areas where
millions live without access to proper care.
And despite the Digital Health revolution already kicking off in China too, adoption
and progress have been relatively slow.
For example, Ping An Insurance, one of China’s major insurers, is already pushing for a national
telemedicine network.
They’re offering a simple app to order non-prescription medicine and personal care products online.
Users only need to complete a quick, AI-driven questionnaire on the app to determine their
health needs, after which the products will be delivered to their home or office within
just an hour.
But if a patient’s diagnosis requires more than a quick fix, consumers may decide to
turn to China’s social network, WeChat.
WeChat has the ambition to become a one-stop solution for all kinds of consumer needs.
And healthcare is part of it.
They’ve been steadily building up a network of participating hospitals where users can
book doctor’s appointments through their app to avoid long lines at the hospital.
Following their health checkup, patients can also conveniently access their medical reports
through WeChat,
But China’s main focus is on A.I development.
Just think of their social credit system: It’s evil, but it’s state of the art.
And China’s crown jewels in AI development are is the group of three data giants, Baidu,
Alibaba, and Tencent, or as they are collectively known, the BAT.
These three companies already have access to all kinds of data about China’s giant
population, but they are going even further than that.
They are well established in America, and they are investing heavily in Silicon Valley
startups too.
They are attractive to Western businesses because they offer access to the lucrative
Chinese market, which can otherwise be impossible to penetrate.
But access to the Chinese market comes at a big price: their business data.
And you might have heard it already: data is the new oil.
If you add the data of these Western companies to the data of the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens,
the BAT have an enormous competitive edge over the rest of the World.
Now what are they going to do with it?
Deep learning algorithms trained through the data of billions can analyze medical outputs
like CT and MR images with great accuracy.
This promise has led to the fact that now over 130 companies are working on projects
on how to apply A.I. in China’s healthcare sector.
In 2017 Tencent launched an A.I.-powered diagnostic service in 10 hospitals across the country.
This service takes images of patient tissues and feeds them into an A.I. algorithm, which
can then determine in under four seconds whether the tissue looks normal, inflamed or cancerous.
This service currently offers over 90 percent accuracy in certain types of cancers and 97
percent for diabetic retinopathy.
China has slowly, but strategically built up their A.I. system over the past twenty
years, to be an absolute technological superpower of the future.
The only question is, how they are going to leverage their state of the art A.I.
On the one hand, they can turn into a “developer’s paradise” and create the most advanced healthcare
system Western countries can only dream of.
Or if they keep going down the road that started with the social credit system, they can bring
into effect the most dreadful, Black Mirror-like dystopia we have ever seen.
A system that abuses the health of individuals, and a credit system that punishes people’s
behavior by restricting their access to health services.
The stakes are high and the world is watching.
Which path are you going to take, China?