A few people wait to see a doctor at Infectious Disease Division of Shenzhen University General Hospital.(PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
On the first day of her role as an online medical adviser, Mao Hua, a 51-year-old doctor in Shenzhen, provided consultations for more than 70 patients.
The physician, with nearly three decades of experience working in public hospitals, has been offering diagnostic opinions through online chatting since the novel coronavirus outbreak began.
She handled online inquiries in between consultations and attending to patients in hospital, while on the road or even after work until 11 pm.
“Most of them seek online doctors’ help, worried about getting infected, especially when they have a slight fever or cold,” said Mao.
She said she understands their worries and uses most of the time online to offer consolation, disseminate accurate information and build up people’s knowledge of the disease.
Online-consultations, the drug delivery supply chain, personal healthcare management and public and private insurance will form an ecosystem for interoperable data flow between the four components
Jens Ewert, head of Deloitte China Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry
For Mao, it’s her first attempt although hundreds of thousands of doctors in China have been providing similar services. Technology firms with registered doctors working part-time are leading the field, but the pandemic has pushed public hospitals to speed up the digitization pace.
The online healthcare sector bodes well for market players and experts, who expect more “internet hospital” licenses to be granted and more provinces to include online medical costs in the insurance system.
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Hospitals turn ‘virtual’
So far, some 80 hospitals have launched online inquiry platforms on the pandemic in Guangdong province, and the first batch of 57 hospitals that opened in January had dealt with inquiries from more than 20,000 people about the coronavirus by mid-February.
One of them is Shenzhen University General Hospital, which set up a mini program on WeChat on Jan 30 to provide free medical consultations on the coronavirus. More than 40 doctors had helped some 710 people through online chatting by March 6.
Patients have to pick a doctor first, based on their introduction, and then input personal identification information to talk to the physician. Each one can review what others said or leave a comment on a doctor’s page.
Yi Shijian, deputy director of the hospital’s outpatient department, said the online consultation platform can provide virus-related information and advise people what to do if they need to go to a hospital for a face-to-face diagnosis.
“We can thus address their worries and anxiety so they can do away with unnecessary trips to hospitals and reduce the risks of cross-infection,” he said.
Yi believes the platform will continue to operate for a few months and won’t close down immediately after the pandemic is gone. However, doctors at the hospital are unable to offer any prescription through online diagnosis before gaining an official “internet hospital” license.
There are 22 licensed “internet hospitals” in Guangdong under the health authority’s supervision since the first batch was issued in April.
“We applied for the license before the outbreak and expect to get the green light in June,” Yi said.
He said they’ll bring in video chatting as the fifth-generation communication is becoming prevalent. “In the first stage of operation, another 150 doctors will participate and, gradually, it’ll include all of our doctors.”
All departments will have access to the online facility, and patients with chronic illnesses will benefit most as they require long-term prescriptions.
To ensure full coverage of an e-hospital, it’s important to train doctors in making an accurate online diagnosis and rolling out related rules in order to avoid medical errors, Yi stressed.
Besides public hospitals, internet-based medical platforms are also gaining traction during the outbreak.
Online medical platforms
Chinese internet giants, Alibaba, Tencent and JD, have set up their online healthcare flagships in recent years, hiring hundreds of thousands of part-time doctors, charging fees ranging from several yuan to several hundreds. But, as the number of coronavirus cases in China rose, they made most of their services free.
Ping An Good Doctor — China’s largest healthcare platform — claimed that the number of its new registered users has climbed tenfold, while daily consultations have gone up nine times during the outbreak. The number of its total registered users had reached 315 million by the end of last year.
Jens Ewert, head of Deloitte China Life Sciences and Healthcare Industry, said as more hospitals obtain “internet hospital” licenses, these online platforms will undertake most of the return visits of chronic disease patients, and more provinces will cover these return visits with a basic medical insurance system.
For the first visit, the government will continue to be very cautious, so he foresees a “health on- and off-line model” in future.
Ewert noted that since the virus outbreak, online medical consultations and drug sales have grown significantly, and the daily application installations of such tools have doubled or even tripled. In fact, the sector’s compound annual growth rate has risen by more than 20 percent in recent years.
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He anticipated that online-consultations, the drug delivery supply chain, personal healthcare management and public and private insurance will form an ecosystem for interoperable data flow between the four components.
“However, balancing data interoperability and security is always a tough nut to crack,” said Ewert.
His advice is to build a close loop of such an ecosystem, set up a standard DRG (diagnosis-related group), coding of drugs, and consistent identification of a specific patient through all data systems in the loop.
