Universal health coverage is essential to achieving a key pillar of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But how do you provide quality healthcare for all with limited resources? It’s a global challenge, one that’s getting more pressing as populations grow and age. One solution is to spend more; another is to train and hire more healthcare professionals.

At the Intelligent Health summit in Switzerland,  Tencent Healthcare discussed an increasingly important way forward: digital innovation and AI. Deployed properly, it can lead to better health information, literacy, and access to services, especially for disadvantaged communities, while decreasing inefficiencies and bottlenecks among providers. Here are some key takeaways.

Bridge the online and offline

You can’t take a pill or have surgery in the cloud. What’s needed is an aggregated service that connects the online and offline. Many countries have accelerated the process in recent years. To succeed, though, it’s essential to get the industry on board, including hospitals, pharmacies, and medical practices.

Helping patients

Develop a seamless health-services portal

Responding to the challenge to make healthcare and information accessible to as many people as possible, we created a Tencent Healthcare mini program. The portal sits within Weixin, which has grown from a messaging app into a multipurpose ecosystem used by over a billion people in China.

Users can book appointments, health checks, and vaccinations, as well as access online pharmacies and manage health records. People can also subscribe to a health education service in the portal. Indicating areas of interest tells the mini program which kinds of news to send you.

To date, over 80 million people have used the portal.

Provide reliable information

There’s a ton of confusing health information online, not all of it accurate. To cut through the muddle, we created our own medical wiki backed by rigorous editorial standards and expertise.

We develop articles about infectious diseases and a host of health conditions, supplemented by animation and short videos. Top doctors livestream sessions on our platform and answer patient questions. It’s a way to democratize their knowledge.

Improve access to medication

You can order deliveries for over-the-counter drugs and set medication reminders. Just scan the packaging and enter some basic details and the portal will remind you when, for how long, and how often you need to take a drug.

Speaking of packaging, how many times have you struggled to read the information leaflet that comes with medication? The print is often absurdly tiny. Now, if you’re uncertain about a drug, you can scan the box and instantly get answers about drug interactions, contraindications, and side effects on your phone.

Helping doctors

Enhance the accuracy of diagnoses

Large medical models (LMMs), trained on reams of medical data, are assisting doctors in making the right diagnosis. We have developed a model that is currently used by more than a thousand leading medical-service providers in China — with encouraging results. What’s more, the model is a useful training tool to help doctors in remote areas stay up to date with diagnostics gold standards.

For example, the cell morphology analyzer backed by Tencent’s AI achieves an accuracy rate of up to 95 percent, and the analysis time is shortened from 25 minutes to half a minute, helping doctors assess.

Support health and medical professionals

To get medical workers on board and encourage the adoption of the new technology, we provide technical support and positive feedback about their work. More and more people in health-related professions are seeing the benefits of AI in handling some typically frustrating issues, such as paperwork and number of consultations.

Used as intended, the portal becomes an invaluable education and self-help tool for the public, and a tireless assistant and time-saver for health workers and the healthcare system.