On September 14, 2022, in the national final for Smart Health of the 5th “Blossom Cup” 5G Application Competition hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the “5G-based whole-life-cycle multimodal follow-up platform” jointly developed by PUMCH and China Mobile Communications Group, by virtue of its solid foundation, innovative development concept and bright industrial prospect, stood out among the 1,299 entries nationwide and won the first prize as the best performer.

As the birthplace of modern follow-up in China, PUMCH has pioneered the Chinese model of follow-up management and used it to this day. However, the traditional follow-up has many deficiencies, such as low efficiency of manual dialing, duplicated construction of follow-up systems, inability to share internal data of the hospital, and insufficient security and connectivity of external data. Due to the low coverage of follow-up visits as well as the lack of post-visit case tracking, continuous treatment observation data, and data analysis and mining, the utilization ratio of cases for research is low, which is not conducive to efficacy evaluation and patient management and thus impedes high-quality research output and clinical diagnosis and treatment innovation.

In recent years, the state has issued a number of policies to support and encourage the development of “Internet Plus Healthcare”. President Zhang Shuyang and Vice President Wu Peixin attach great importance to the digital transformation of the hospital and the role of technological innovation in driving hospital development; they believe that public hospitals should eagerly seize the opportunity of the innovative integration of the new-generation information technologies, such as cloud computing and 5G, and medical services, and view ensuring the service model of protecting the whole-life-cycle health as an important task for the high-quality development of public hospitals. To make good use of case resources, promote data sharing, empower clinical research and improve diagnosis and treatment capabilities, the Telemedicine Center, Information Technology Center and the Department of Medical Records, among others, led by hospital leaders in charge, worked with relevant units of China Mobile Communications Group; they have designed and built a digital, multimodal and intelligent follow-up platform covering the whole life cycle with “the most advanced platform, technology and concept” as the goal.

The project team has organized dozens of online and offline survey meetings, and has collected follow-up forms on 25 diseases from 12 departments and 17 nursing follow-up forms from 19 wards and thereby sorted out 142 types of  requirements in 12 categories, such as patient management, general follow-up, specialized follow-up, and caring follow-up. At the same time, the project team combed through follow-up data and sources based on clinical needs, and then established a preliminary follow-up data set with 359 field-level granularity from 16 interfaces.

Geared towards the overarching goal of intelligent service and management, the 5G-based intelligent whole-life-cycle multimodal follow-up platform integrates the rich follow-up experience on specialized diseases and leverages core technologies such as 5G and AI to build the eight capabilities of the capability middle platform and the data middle platform, all in a bid to satisfy clinical needs. The platform strives for precision management, personalized patient services, precision follow-up paths, and diverse communication and education methods. It supports the PUMCH model of whole-life-cycle health management by collecting multi-modal and digitalized personal health information spanning the whole life cycle. Since its launch in October 2021, the platform has continued to iterate, and now it has carried out regular inpatient and outpatient patient satisfaction surveys and follow-up visits for specialized diseases, and has completed a total of 20,000 follow-up visits for 8 types of specialized diseases and 6,000 patient satisfaction surveys per month. Thanks to these efforts, the platform acts as a bridge of communication between doctors and patients and significantly helps PUMCH further improve its quality and compassionate medical services.

Director Wang Yi (right) was giving a project presentation

Written by: The PUMCH Internet Hospital Project Team

Picture courtesy: The PUMCH Internet Hospital Project Team

Translator: Liu Haiyan

Editor: Wang Yao