Telemedicine, something that has long existed in China before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, witnessed robust growth amid COVID-19 as people quarantined themselves at home and hospitals reduced clinical reception.
“How can the novel coronavirus pneumonia patients be treated?” “How can they be discharged?”
Those are netizens’ questions raised to Wang Tao, chief physician of the Department of
Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine under Union Hospital affiliated to Tongji Medical College
of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, on an online medical platform.
Since the onset of COVID-19, the medical platform Haodf.com joined hands with People’s Daily
app and Xuexi Qiangguo app , and invited around 210,000 doctors to offer free online medical
services.
According to statistics, the daily visits of Haodf.com since the outbreak of COVID-19 stood
around 200,000, jumping tenfold, which is impossible for any brick-and-mortar hospital except
Internet ones – as they can mobilize national resources of doctors.
From Jan. 22 to Feb. 25, Haodf.com received 4.26 million users, 20 percent of whom were on the
platform for consultation of pneumonia and relevant sicknesses. There were approximately 20,000
doctors online on a daily basis receiving the patients.
Haodf is not the only one that offers online medical services. On Jan. 23, an early phase of
COVID-19, a real-time aiding platform for novel coronavirus pneumonia was launched by
WeDoctor, which provides online access to licensed doctors. The platform offered free online
diagnosis, psychological counseling, online clinic, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) counseling
and remote consultation. As of 10:00 pm on March 13, the platform was visited 125 million times,
and 48,581 doctors received patients, offering services to 1.61 million people.
Besides, WeDoctor has also opened a special platform for Wuhan that offered online subsequent
visits, insurance-coverage prescription and medicine delivery services to over 50,000 people in the
city in around a dozen days.
As a matter of fact, over 10 online medical platforms including Alibaba Health, Chunyu Yisheng,
Tencent Doctorwork and Ping An Good Doctor, have witnessed rapid growth of visits during
COVID-19, playing their roles and contributing to the anti-epidemic efforts. Their services
encouraged people in home quarantine to be optimistic about the situation.
Statistics from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Office (MIIT) indicate that currently
there are 191 public medical institutions and nearly 100 online hospitals offering free services to
relieve the pressure on the medical system during the pandemic. The ministry introduced that
China is steadfastly promoting the application of information technologies in online diagnosis and
digital health, and enhancing the deployment of 5G infrastructure in the medical system, so as to
make hospitals informationized, make medical devices smart and make online platforms more
convenient.
“Online consultation is the first step toward ‘digital health,’” said Li Dewen, deputy director of the
MIIT’s information center. He believes the effective human-machine interaction is able to relieve
the pressure of hospitals in preliminary diagnosis, help users make reasonable plans, and to some
extent lower the risk of cross-infection.
Online medical platforms also stepped out to overseas users during the pandemic, and started
offering medical services based on “Internet+.”
At the midnight of March 16, WeDoctor’s international platform received a request for assistance
from a doctor named Luca Varcasia from the Italian city of Sassari, who explained the severe
situation in the city and the challenges met by his colleagues.
To help the Italian doctor, WeDoctor invited a chief physician named Zhao Lei with Wuhan Union
Hospital, who has gained rich clinical experiences on the frontline of COVID-19 since the
epidemic firstly started, to offer online training courses.
Two days later, Zhao had a video talk with Varcasia and the latter’s colleagues, guiding them how
to effectively prevent and control the disease and sharing China’s experiences in fighting the
pandemic and treating the patients.
Varcasia hailed the video conference, saying the information shared by Zhao and WeDoctor was
“gold” to him and his colleagues.
The video conference not only helped Italian and Chinese medical staff, but also users from 9
countries including the Netherlands and India who watched the livestream.
