Yidu Tech hosted the 2021 AI in Healthcare Seminar on December 9, 2021 to discuss the potential value of medical AI and share the company’s latest developments.Ms. Gong Rujing, Chairlady, CEO and Founder of Yidu Tech, together with top management of the Group attended the seminar and shared the latest progress of Yidu Tech’s business and its future outlook. The seminar also invited several well-known industry experts to discuss, both online and offline in person, the opportunities and challenges of utilizing medical AI to enable the construction of new AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure and green healthcare. The seminar attracted over 100 participants from the healthcare, technology, finance and other industries.

Ms. Gong remarked, “One of the most urgent issues to tackle in the healthcare industry is to improve the efficiency of medical research as well as diagnosis and treatment. This is also what prompted me to establish Yidu Tech in the first place. Since our inception in 2014, we have committed to developing the healthcare data intelligence infrastructure to improve the productivity of medical evidence and knowledge generation and boost the efficiency of medical R&D and diagnosis and treatment, in order to drive the shift of decision-making in the healthcare system from an experience-based approach to an evidence and value-based approach. Over the years, our development path is always focused on the three themes of safety, technology, and innovation to promote the application of data intelligence in different use case scenarios, including public health, research, and diagnosis and treatment. Moving forward, Yidu Tech will continue to invest in core technologies, strengthen data compliance and security, and promote the construction of an innovative application ecosystem to help achieve our mission ‘tomake value-based precision healthcare accessible to everyone’.”

With respect to the value that the company can bring to the healthcare industry,Professor Zeng Ming, Non-executive Director of Yidu Tech and former Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba Group, said in his opening remarks that “Building an intelligent business not only entails restructuring the traditional business through digital solutions, but also network-oriented reconfiguration based on algorithms integrated with industry insights, so as to achieve the breakthrough from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing and provide smart services. As such, companies which focus on deep industry cultivation are more likely to constantly innovate and achieve breakthroughs, such as Yidu Tech which uses artificial intelligence to bring green healthcare into a high-speed development track and generates great value.”

During the seminar, several executives of Yidu Tech introduced in detail how the company continuously accumulated and iterated the modeled knowledge graphs, through the use of the healthcare data intelligence infrastructure YiduCore. It enables application scenarios such as public health safety, clinical diagnosis and treatment, drug and device research and development, and real-world evidence (RWE) through digital and intelligent technologies to improve the efficiency of precision medicine and supply side and release productivity.

In addition, Yidu Tech also invited a number of well-known medical and industry experts to share their opinions on hot topics in the industry such as clinical research, innovative drug development, new healthcare infrastructure, medical AI, and data security, as well as the outlook of the industry from their unique perspectives.

• Dr. Yan Jun, Executive Director, Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Scientist of Yidu Techpointed out that“Human-machine collaboration will be the mainstream approach of utilizing AI in a long run in the future, especially in the field of medicine and healthcare. Therefore, how to build interpretable machine learning will be one of the keys to the application of data intelligence in all medical scenarios. Leveraging YiduCore and with proper authorization, we are able to assist clients such as medical institutions to make data computable and achieve efficient and high-quality data integration and governance. Through continuous iteration of self-learning, the modeled knowledge graph is continuously accumulated and strengthened to promote real breakthroughs in clinical diagnosis, treatment, and disease cognition, which in turn provides value in multiple scenarios such as public health, research, and diagnosis and treatment.”

• On the value of healthcare data intelligence infrastructure for hospitals,Professor Sun Ying, Deputy Director of Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, mentioned “The new infrastructure of hospital informatization is to turn medical data into a new production factor and accelerate the deployment of intelligent applications in all scenarios, including patients management, medical care, administration and logistics, and jointly promote the upgrading and transformation of the medical disciplines.  It can also strengthen medical institutions’ capabilities to radiate knowledge. The ultimate beneficiaries of these initiatives will include healthcare staff, our patients, hospital administrators, and medical researchers. Through the cooperation with Yidu Tech in the past years, we started from recognizing the value of data to the stratification and hierarchical management of data, turned information into knowledge through input of medical insights from physicians, and finally formed a disease cognition and learning system in each disease area. I think this has brought real value to the clinical frontline.”

• Regarding applications of AI-enabled technology in clinical trials,Ms. Jiang Min,Director of National Drug Clinical Trial Institute Office, Peking University Cancer Hospitalsaid that “To enable the data quality management of clinical trials with AI has been a trend for our practice. Compared with traditional manual sampling and quality control, AI has significant advantages in terms of accuracy, processing efficiency, and quantitative evaluation. We have actively cooperated with AI technology companies like Yidu Tech to jointly improve the clinical trial data management of Peking University Cancer Hospital. We look forward to serving as the clinical research ward demonstration unit to promote policy implementation, driving more hospitals to upgrade the management of clinical trials.”

• Mr. Xu Jiming, Co-founder and Senior Vice President of Yidu Tech, and CEO of HappyLife Techshared that “In order to better meet the industry’s needs for cost reduction and efficiency enhancement, we have leveraged our technological advantages and clinical operation experience into CRO. To provide better research protocol design for clinical trials through a digital and intelligent approach that promotes faster enrollment, higher quality examinations, and a 30% speed-up in clinical trial projects. At present, we offer life science solutions to multinational pharmaceutical companies and domestic companies that are currently in transformation. We empower clinical trials from design to operation and improve the competitiveness of our customers’ corresponding products in the pipeline, realizing the commercial value of data intelligence.”

• From the perspective of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies,Mr. Zheng Weiyi, Vice President and Head of Clinical Operations, AstraZeneca Global R&D (China) Center, said that “The inflection point for the rapid development of digital technology industrialization has arrived. For embarking on this rapid development period, the support of mature technology and services, the back-up and acceptance from research institutions and researchers, and the promotion and assistance from drug R&D companies are indispensable. Companies like Yidu Tech offer mature technologies and a proven service model based on the characteristics of China’s R&D environment. They have begun to change the traditional operating concepts andareutilizing data intelligence to drive an era of change in clinical trials and operations.”

• Mr. Hao Yiming,Vice President of Yidu Tech and General Manager of Innovative Healthcare Solutions, Happy Life Tech,also expressed his faith in RWE’s development in China as that “China has unique advantages and the potential to lead the world in terms of RWE innovation and development. In the next three to five years, assisting our customers to improve data quality, expanding our multi-domain talent pool, and shortening the timing between high-quality scientific research and clinical application are the three major tasks that Yidu Tech will concentrate its effort on. Thisis essential for us to build RWE solutions throughout drugs and devices whole lifecycle and maximize our solutions’ value."

• On the opportunities for using RWE, another hot topic for drugs and devices development,Ms. Li Wei, Chief Medical Officer of RareStone Group, believed that “In order to embrace the RWE era, the pharmaceutical industry must strive to improve its work in the following three areas: first, all parties have to collaborate with each other to improve the collection and management of real-world data; the second is tool innovation, in terms of R&D strategies to promote the integration of real-world data into the entire drug development cycle; the third is to strengthen advocacy and education to optimize the industry environment for utilizing real-world data technology.”

• Regarding the advancing regulatory environment for data-related industries,Mr. Li Chaoying, Founding Partner of Han Kun Law Offices, said “A series of national legislation and regulations on data security protection have been promulgated recently. For the medical industry, especially the medical big data technology industry, I believe that the opportunities outweigh the challenges. First, the value from the application of big data technology in the medical industry is evident to all, whether for the current pandemic prevention and control, or in improving the overall standard of diagnosis and treatment and the promotion of people’s well-being, all of which are deemed to be of great importance and is strongly encouraged at the national policy level; second, only by doing a good job in the top-level design from the legislation to the judicial field, investment and business development in this industry will be more secure to sustain innovation.”

• Mr. Li Guangwei, the host and participant of the 30-year Daqing study in China (a milestone study in the world's primary prevention of diabetes), Former Vice Chairman of the Endocrinology Society of Chinese Medical Association, also attended the seminar and expressed his expectations on AI technology to support diabetic patient management.  “Our long-term research proves that lifestyle improvement is effective in controlling or reversing diabetes. However, physicians are too limited in number and energy to divert to general patient education and supervision. I look forward to utilizing AI to help healthcare providers strengthen patient education and encourage patients to change their bad habits, as well as to do intelligent information processing and provide timely feedback to doctors on patients’ conditions to solve clinical pain points. I think this is significant for the hundreds of millions of diabetic and prediabetic patients and their families in our country.”

To wrap up the event, Ms. Yang Jing, Executive Director, President and Chief Financial Officer of Yidu Tech remarked, “We held this seminar with an eagerness to learn and a fully open attitude, and we truly benefited from the fruitful sharing and the enthusiastic participation from our speakers. The mission and strategic path of Yidu Tech will always remain the same. On the premise of security and compliance, we will continue to expand our data intelligent network coverage, increase investment in scientific research and innovation and consolidate the algorithm advantages of YiduCore data processing algorithms as well as disease models, so as to strive towards the mission of building green healthcare.”

The seminar was chaired by Ms. Feng Xiaoying, Co-chief Financial Officer of Yidu Tech.