Just what the doctor ordered: how AI could help China bridge the medical resources gap

Li Bin, a doctor at the First Hospital of Lanzhou University, was among the wave of Chinese consumers who snapped up Apple Mac Mini computers during the country’s frenzied adoption of the OpenClaw artificial intelligence agent earlier this year.

The young surgeon from Lanzhou, the capital of northwestern China’s Gansu province, bought one to run the open-source program, using it to develop an app to extract and organise information from doctor-patient conversations and lab report photos into structured medical records, eliminating the need for tedious and time-consuming manual data entry.

Thanks to AI, he said “a doctor with no coding training can build such applications at very low cost” to meet specific needs.

Li’s deft use of AI tools to streamline his medical work epitomises China’s national push to integrate AI into its healthcare industry, an initiative that experts say could help bridge gaps in the country’s medical resource distribution and raise efficiency in the sector.

As well as boosting the productivity of individual doctors, AI can also help improve medical service quality across a hospital, said Song Yuqin, deputy head of Beijing Cancer Hospital (BCH), at a recent healthcare industry forum.

For instance, she said, an AI system played a role in clinical trial research conducted at the hospital for lung cancer patients.

It ran automatically overnight, matching prospective participants against all lung cancer clinical trials to produce a ranked list of suitable studies for each, with notifications sent by 7am highlighting the top options.