Hubei Province in China has picked Ping An Smart City, a technology company under the Ping An Group, to assist in building its one-stop public health emergency management platform.

The company specifically won the bid for the public health emergency command system project under the Hubei Provincial Healthcare Big Data Center and Public Health Emergency Management Platform Construction Project.

WHAT IT DOES

Through its smart healthcare team, Ping An Smart City utilises big data, cloud computing, AI and other technologies to transform and upgrade urban public health management platforms that aid city managers in tracking epidemic situations in real-time and accurately assessing trends.

The team made solutions to improve public health emergency management in three areas:

• A surveillance system for public health-related risk factors that connects to four major channels, including hospitals, disease control centres, emergency centres and nucleic acid test centres;

• An AI-driven alert and prediction system to predict the evolution of public health emergencies; and

• An AI-based medical system with grid management to quickly provide prevention and control guidelines for emerging infectious diseases.

So far, the tech firm has developed over 70 AI disease prediction models, 90 smart medical image models, 2,000 disease diagnosis models, 120 disease treatment models, 50 disease Q&A models and two end-to-end management models.

WHY IT MATTERS

According to a press release, Ping An's assistance will add the following functions to the Hubei Provincial Public Health Emergency Command System: smart monitoring, smart alerts, smart prediction, decision-making support, panoramic display of emergency management and emergency command dispatch.

"It will set a new standard for public health emergency management systems in China," the company said about the project.

Ping An claims its solutions help resolve the three major challenges confronting public health emergency management: the insufficient channels for the collection of infectious disease reports; inadequate data to run systems that can support sophisticated prevention and control decisions or plan; and lack of efficient screening tools in frontline medical institutions, leading to weak emergency response.

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Last month, China revamped its public health bureaucracy through the creation of the National Administration of Disease Prevention and Control that will focus on crafting policies for the prevention and control of infectious diseases.

According to Xinhua, the newly-established administration will be responsible for the development of disease prevention and control systems, epidemic monitoring and early warning systems, and scientific research for disease control.

China's Vice Premier Sun Chunlan has called for the establishment of disease prevention and control agencies from national down to county levels.