Guangzhou gives birth to China's smartest hospital

Guangdong Second Provincial General Hospital launched a comprehensive state-of-art artificial intelligence system on April 2, making it China's "smartest" hospital by far.

Currently, most hospitals in China utilize AI technology in just a few treatment processes. However, in cooperation with China's first-rate AI tech companies, such as Tencent and iFLYTEK, the Guangzhou-based hospital has now applied AI technologies in ten areas including inquiry, diagnosis, guidance, payment, and logistics.

In conventional hospitals, patients have to go through six staff-serviced steps, namely registration, waiting, inspection, the physical test, fee payment, and drug collection. However, in this smart hospital, patients are now able to complete nearly all of these steps, besides the inspection and physical test, online.

More importantly, the hospital also boasts an "AI Doctor" which makes diagnosis and treatment suggestions for more than 200 diseases with an over-90-percent accuracy rate.

Smart inquiry: free and open to the public

The hospital has added an "AI Doctor" to the diagnosis service section of its official WeChat account. Anyone with a smart phone can access it, state his or her symptoms and disease history which requires around one to three minutes, and then receive a preliminary diagnosis. Bookings for treatment can also be made through WeChat with ease.

The "AI Doctor" serves not only the general public but also professional doctors. Doctors could refer to patients' AI diagnosis records on WeChat, which effectively raises their working efficiency and accuracy. As a result, the average diagnosis time spent with a patient would likely be halved.

The "AI Doctor" could also help doctors examine medical images, discerning tiny details that the human eye could miss.

A boy interacts with an AI robot in the outpatient hall of Guangdong Second Provincial General Hospital. [Photo/news.dayoo.com]