The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the development of smart healthcare in China. In fact, industry insiders are anticipating explosive growth in the sector within the coming years.

This is an AI robot inquiring about the health status of a Beijing resident who just returned from outside the city during a phone call.
With the help of such a system, the city of Wuhan screened about nine million people for COVID-19 in just three days over a year ago.
And thanks to the application of assistant image systems, the diagnosis of a coronavirus patient took no longer than three seconds.
The fight against the pandemic has shown how capable Internet-based and AI-powered smart healthcare is, but participants at this year's Boao Forum say this may just be the start.

Chen Hua is the CEO of the Hainan-headquartered Yili i-Hospital.
[Photo taken by China Plus]

Chen Hua is the CEO of the Hainan-headquartered Yili i-Hospital.
He said AI technology has played an increasingly important role in certain medical areas.
"A major task is to help doctors collect general information when they start the treatment. Another area where it has been broadly used is image recognition."
China issued official guidelines in 2019 for the development of smart hospitals that use information technology to provide smart services, such as appointments, medical services, waiting reminders, and hospital navigation to patients.
So far, over 1,100 such institutions have been put into operation nationwide. Chen Hua said they are looking forward to more advanced AI technology that can better help analyze patient conditions, improve data storage, and provide better advice.
"With a stronger data calculation capacity and faster transmission speed in the future, we can integrate more human experiences, disease knowledge, real-world scenes, data, images and videos with AI to make it even smarter and be able to give more helpful treatment proposals."