How big tech helped battle Covid-19 in China
By Line Heidenheim Juul
Chatbot calls, image recognition on speed, and tracking are a few of the solutions deployed in China to fight the spread of Covid-19. The demand for telemedicine and digital solutions has been increasing steadily over the past years, but the Corona-crisis has further opened the gates. By now the virus is virtually eradicated in China with too few cases to test a new potential vaccine. How did big tech help battle Covid-19 then?
AI and chatbots handle crowd overview
During the initial outbreak, the local authorities in Wuhan were able to use a chatbot to call a huge number of isolated citizens and ask them questions about their temperature and health condition. The technology was provided by iFlytek, a Chinese company and world leader in speech technologies, language synthesis and natural language processing. Their chatbot solutions coupled with an extensive artificial intelligence algorithm was able to help local governments efficiently map out and create an overview of areas most in need of attention during the span of the initial outbreak, with a speed that human labor could not. Their solution worked so well that it was also deployed in Seoul, as the Korean language processing was advanced enough to do so.
In Similar efforts to help governments map out and control outbreak areas, Alibaba DAMO Academy offered its Cloud Computing capabilities in an epidemic prediction solution, providing estimates of size, peak time, and duration. They claimed it had an 98% accuracy.
Image recognition – speeding up process from 15 minutes to 15 seconds!
In the beginning of the epidemic in China the testing-kits were sparse and slow, so the government encouraged tech companies to use medical imaging to identify the virus. Ping An Good Doctor, Yitu Technology, iFlytek and Alibaba’s DAMO Academy were among the first to announce solutions using image recognition processing of CT-scans that proved to have a 90% accuracy in just 15 seconds or less. A process that would typically take a radiologist up to 15 minutes. Beijing startup Infervision Technology also quickly deployed and implemented software using artificial intelligence (AI) in an infrared CT scan to detect pneumonia lesions with 83% accuracy, while DAMO claimed to have 96% accuracy. These solutions already existed, but were adjusted to help doctors triage and diagnose much faster. Yitu Healthcare also started working with East European governments and deploying solutions.
Sequencing the virus with AI on cloud
Like with SARS the world`s scientist`s wanted to identify the virus, sequence it and then start developing a vaccine for it. Unlike SARS, when scientists had to wait months to understand the viral genome structure, in the time of Corona, tech companies like Alibaba DAMO Academy was able to create an algorithm that could identify this in 30 minutes, allowing research to accelerate faster globally. The analytics solution running on Alibaba Cloud include viral generic data screening, evolutionary analysis, protein structure analysis and diagnostic reporting. China is betting on winning the great vaccine race.
5G enabled hospital built in 10 days
It is old news by now, that one of the emergency hospitals set up in Wuhan was built in 10 days. Many looked in awe at the time lapse videos widely circulated online, and many were surprised of China´s ability to react so speedily to an imminent crisis. Huawei managed to complete the construction of the hospital 5G network in 3 days, allowing for faster connectivity and video conferencing. 5G was also leveraged in other areas to support drones distributing masks or information. Read more about Chinas bet on 5G and what it means for global businesses in our article about How China is accelerating 5G Dominance.
Free online consultations and prescriptions assisted by AI
As we wrote about earlier, companies such as Ping An Good Doctor, Alibaba Health Information Technology (AliHealth), WeDoctor and Tencent Trusted Doctor were among the healthcare stars to quickly offer online consultations to a wide number of citizens, helped by AI-assisted virtual doctors that made the process more effective and allowed in-house real doctors treat up to 700 patients per day. Patients were able to chat, talk and text with an AI-assisted doctor before being referred to real doctors, who in turn were helped by the underlying AI to quickly diagnose and offer treatment or prescriptions that could be shipped directly from nearby pharmacies. The platforms were already developed, but during the peak of the pandemic they all made many services free of charge, helping many patients avoid the risks of having to go to physical hospitals.
In turn AliHealth saw their monthly active users grow to 390 million and Ping An Good Doctors was 350 million by the end of Q2, claiming they had a daily average of 831.000 consultations.
These companies stake in the healthcare sector is not sudden or temporary, and they each claim their own advantage in the market. AliHealth have a strong advantage in the ecosystem of ecommerce, and focus clearly on prescription and sale of pharmaceuticals, whereas Ping An’s ability to process claims via the traditional insurtech company coupled with certificates to work with offline hospitals to do online diagnosis and prescription is unique and a long-term investment.
Tracking and uniform color codes
Collection and processing of data from telecom companies and fintech companies is another example of relatively old tech being deployed to solve a new problem. Alibaba and Tencent were fast to work with local governments and tele providers to develop an in-app color coded solutions to let most unexposed people mobilize and get back to work. It was launched so quick that is was not uniformed from the beginning, but measures have been taken to fix that. The use of contact less payment and QR codes has for years been acceptable in the cash-less society that China has become. Tracking and privacy data issues remain unsolved, but China needed to get back to business quick. Read more about that here.
In addition to the technologies we chose to mention here, there were also several others assisting the fight against corona. Among others, robots and drones have been used in hospital care and delivery, while facial recognition is already heavily used for crowd control, and of course cloud computing powers were made available for free from Didi Cloud, Huawei and Tencent to help speed up the vaccine.
Was COVID-19 the key driver here?
As it always is in China, it is important to look at the key drivers behind rapid development to understand the long term perspective. Many companies this year have asked themselves if the CEO or Covid-19 lead the digital transformation in their company. Covid-19 is clearly the catalysator and main driver, but in China the government is a key driver of innovation in general, and that can be seen in central plans such as Healthy China 2030 and The Five Year Plans. These are key documents to understand for all global businesses, as they are overall blueprints for China’s development. Just last week the communiqué for the next 2021-2025 plan was published highlighting self-reliance, innovation, and quality growth.
What do these trends point to?
The health service industry in China is expected to hit an CNY 8 trillion in revenue and China is expected to become the largest digital telehealth market in the world. Ahead of Covid-19 all the major tech players had technology already rolled out, and have for years been building ecosystems to improve customer experience and retainment. In the same period both money flows in AI+health and strong government support and regulation has been increasing since 2014. While investments have cooled in recent years, Covid-19 has exponentially accelerated the already needed telemedicine solutions, and the traditional offline hospitals have had to look for partnerships and market ready solutions.
At the same time, consumers in China that are already curious and willing to try new things have been pushed further to embrace the digital venues in healthcare. A rapidly aging population and scarce medical ressources will further force both patients and governments to welcome tech in healthcare, making China once again one of the biggest testing grounds in the world.
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