Wang Yifan (left) says paediatrician avatars helped answer questions about her baby, reducing trips to hospital Copyright AFP Jade GAO
Rebecca BAILEY
Throughout her first pregnancy, Wang Yifan had lots of questions, which she usually put to renowned obstetrician Duan Tao — or rather, an AI clone of the top Shanghaibased doctor.
Duan has created a digital double for healthcare app AQ, which now boasts more than 100 million users in a display of how hightech parts of China’s medical sector have become.
A statedriven digitisation, aiming to inject efficiency into the overstretched healthcare system, has been underway for over a decade.
But with rapid developments in AI and robotics, the government, companies and practitioners see an opportunity to turbocharge that transition.
“Three to five years at most, and our entire medical model will be radically transformed,” the softspoken Duan told AFP.
To train his avatar, Duan selected material, including textbooks, clinical case studies and content from his social platforms — followed by more than 10 million — to capture his tone.
The chatbot cannot prescribe medication, and AQ’s maker, tech giant Ant Group, says it is not a substitute for treatment.
“At the beginning, I did have concerns,” Duan said. “I value my personal reputation.”
But he believes in “actively embracing” technology to help improve it.
– ‘Democratising access’ –
Beijing is soon expected to release its 15th FiveYear Plan, a blueprint for the world’s secondlargest economy until 2030 with technological transformation at its heart.
An October framework called for scientific breakthroughs to “enter practical application quickly”, and referenced intelligent healthcare solutions.
AQ, or Afu in Chinese, now has more than 1,000 expert digital doubles.
The app “gives any ordinary user — no matter where they are — the opportunity to get good answers to their questions,” Duan said.
“What we’re doing is democratising access to medical knowledge.”
That’s especially appealing in China, where “waiting all morning for a threeminute appointment” is common, he said.
Within half a year, Duan’s AI bot had 160,000 patients.
During Wang’s pregnancy, digital Duan was a trusted mediator when she and her husband disagreed, for example on using cooking wine in food.
Since giving birth, she has used AQ even more, asking paediatrician avatars about rashes or for general care advice.
While the app can’t replace doctors, “it can reduce the number of questions we need to ask doctors directly”, Wang told AFP as her baby dozed in her Shanghai apartment.
“If I take my baby to hospital, I worry about crossinfection.”
– ‘Urgency drives change’ –
China’s vast population and territory have always posed challenges to consistent, evenly distributed healthcare – and as its citizens age, stress on the system is increasing.
The challenges are similar to other countries’, but are happening “at a greater scale and a greater pace”, said Ruby Wang, a writer and director of LINTRIS Health consultancy.
“China’s health technology landscape is maturing so quickly, partly because… urgency drives change,” she said.
And “stateindustry alignment allows many pilots to occur quickly”, Wang added.
Chatbot DeepSeek is already used in hundreds of Chinese hospitals, according to one study, and Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University runs a hospital it says is designed to use AI in almost all its processes.
Nationwide, there are more than 100 AI medical projects, an official said recently.
In a top Shanghai hospital, a specialised AI model called CardioMind supports cardiology diagnoses, while a tool called PANDA is being deployed, including in remote towns, to flag early stage pancreatic cancer.
Robotics companies tout their healthcare potential, with firms like Fourier already supplying rural rehab centres with devices like mechanical arms for physiotherapy.
Enthusiasm for AI in healthcare is signalled culturally too.
This year’s televised Spring Festival Gala, a state broadcasterrun New Year ritual, featured a sketch that referenced AQ, and one starring humanoid robots caring for a neglected grandmother.
– Human decisions –
At a busy health centre in Shanghai, Yan Sulian, an energetic 65yearold volunteer, helped older patients with electronic registration.
“Many elderly people just can’t keep up with the smartphone era, so we volunteer to teach them how to adapt,” she told AFP.
Yan said she and her friends all used AQ, after initially crosschecking its answers with doctors.
Life is already highly digitised in China, which explains the broad uptake of hightech healthcare, said LINTRIS’ Wang, with data and privacy not often cited as a concern.
Globally, its accuracy has come under scrutiny though.
Studies suggest while AI chatbots can match human doctors in exam conditions, they are less effective in messier, reallife conversations.
“We must always remember (AI) can hallucinate,” obstetrician Duan said.
“Humans must retain the ultimate decisionmaking and choice.”
But infectious disease expert Zhang Wenhong, a top doctor in China’s Covid19 fight, has voiced concerns that if AI becomes default, “without systematic training, doctors will lose the ability to judge whether AI’s conclusions are correct”.
Others emphasised that the adoption of AI in healthcare will be cautious.
“Doctors as a group are very conservative,” Duan said.
“We insist on safety… because the nature of the profession puts us in that mindset.”
