The Innovative Empowerment Practice of China's Digital Intelligence Wave in Grassroots Health Services from the Perspective of Intelligent Medical Assistants

During the 78th World Health Assembly (WHA78), the China side event with the theme of 'Empowering Primary Health Care with Digital Intelligence to Promote Universal Health Coverage' attracted widespread attention from the international community, and China's experience in using digital technology to empower primary health care was also widely praised. The English official website of the National Health Commission has simultaneously opened a column showcasing China's practice of empowering grassroots health with digital intelligence. Among them, iFlytek Medical Intelligent Medical Assistant was selected for its breakthrough application in empowering primary healthcare intelligence. This marks a highly recognized technological breakthrough and large-scale application of artificial intelligence in the field of grassroots diagnosis and treatment at the national level, vividly illustrating the innovative path of deep integration of digital technology and healthcare under the 'Healthy China' strategy, and providing Chinese wisdom and solutions for the global development of grassroots healthcare.

As the cornerstone of China's medical and health system, grassroots medical and health institutions, with the widest coverage network and over half of the diagnosis and treatment service volume in the country, undertake the important mission of safeguarding the health of billions of people. They are important carriers for implementing hierarchical diagnosis and treatment and the 'Healthy China' strategy. However, the current primary healthcare system still faces a triangular dilemma of 'manpower shortage - weak capacity - resource imbalance', which restricts service quality and residents' health security.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology provides an innovative path to solve this problem. Since its establishment in 2016, Xunfei Medical has focused on primary healthcare scenarios, relying on the world's first AI system intelligent medical assistant to pass the national practicing physician qualification examination. It deeply integrates into the entire process of primary healthcare diagnosis and treatment through human-machine collaboration mode, and significantly improves the efficiency and service quality of doctors through AI technology, becoming a 'digital engine' for improving the quality and efficiency of primary healthcare.

As the 'diagnosis and treatment assistant' of grassroots doctors, intelligent medical assistants can analyze key information such as patients' medical history and symptoms in real time, provide accurate auxiliary diagnostic suggestions for doctors, and effectively reduce the risk of missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis. The built-in knowledge base of over 6000 diseases and intelligent analysis models can help doctors quickly identify the cause, especially in complex case analysis, greatly improving diagnostic accuracy and safety. In addition, the system supports real-time verification of medical record integrity, automatically prompts for missing or empty items, and generates correction suggestions. It also provides more than 600 standardized medical record templates, greatly saving time in medical record writing and review, further improving the standardization and qualification rate of medical records, and providing efficient and reliable data support for medical quality supervision.

As a 'super knowledge base' for grassroots doctors, Smart Medical Assistant integrates more than 13000 clinical guidelines, over 1400 standard clinical pathways, and massive medical literature to build a 'one-stop' medical knowledge retrieval platform. Doctors can access the latest diagnostic and treatment standards and cutting-edge technologies at any time, achieving 'learning while diagnosing and treating' and continuously improving their professional abilities. This feature not only solves the problem of uneven distribution of primary healthcare resources, but also empowers doctors' growth through technology, forming a virtuous cycle of 'using to promote learning'.

As an efficiency 'multiplier' for grassroots doctors, intelligent medical assistants use intelligent voice outbound calling functions to batch complete repetitive tasks such as chronic disease follow-up, health education, physical examination notifications, vaccine reminders, etc. The outbound call results can automatically generate data reports, which facilitates targeted manual intervention by doctors. This not only effectively reduces the administrative burden of doctors, allowing them to invest more time in serving key populations, but also significantly improves residents' health awareness and satisfaction, injecting new momentum into grassroots public health services.

Lei Haichao, Director of the National Health Commission of China, stated in his keynote speech at the border meeting that the Chinese government focuses on grassroots level and is driven by reform and innovation, actively exploring the application of digital technology to continuously improve the medical and health service system. Build an integrated service system, vigorously develop medical consortia, and promote the continuity of the service system. In his speech, he also called on all countries to pay attention to the application of new generation information and artificial intelligence technology in the field of healthcare, jointly promote global digital health and safety governance, standard norms and promotion, and expressed that 'China is willing to share experience and strengthen exchanges and cooperation with other countries in a timely manner, and work together to achieve the goals of universal health coverage and sustainable 

development

Hans Kluge, Regional Director for Europe at the World Health Organization, highly recognizes this. He stated that primary healthcare empowered by artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure is currently playing a role, which is the core goal pursued by the European region of the World Health Organization.

This innovative practice is achieving significant results at the grassroots level in China. At present, intelligent medical assistants have been applied in 692 districts and counties in 31 provinces and cities across the country, serving over 220000 grassroots doctors, providing over 1 billion AI assisted diagnosis suggestions, and standardizing medical records for over 380 million times; In the field of public health, we have served over 800 million people, completed 335 million telephone follow ups, and sent 467 million SMS notifications, laying a 'smart defense line' for primary healthcare and public health services.

https://cn.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202506/13/WS684beadda310205377037fff.html