The introduction of AI is expected to improve data accuracy and continuity (intelligent wearable devices for continuous data collection, combined with patient hospital medical records), provide professional personalized health services (AI doctors/nurses), and create more possibilities (brain-computer interfaces provide assistance for movement and neurorehabilitation, improving the quality of life of disabled patients).
Finance and Economics APP learned that China Merchants Securities released a research report stating that the medical and health field is one of the core areas of AI application, bringing a dual enhancement of experience and efficiency to people's daily health management and treatment behaviors. According to different end customers, applications can be divided into three major directions: To hospitals, To pharmaceutical companies, and To individuals, bullish on AI empowering health management and medical services at all levels, bringing disruptive changes to people's daily health management and treatment behaviors. Limited by data acquisition, the current application of "AI + medical" on the patient side is more based on text generation, information collection, and other methods to provide services, still in the early development stage. With the application of Wenyin and GPT-4 in the medical field, leading companies are expected to benefit first.
The main points of China Merchants Securities are as follows:
There are still many unmet needs in the three major areas of inquiry consultation, auxiliary treatment, and health management.
The contradiction between limited and unevenly distributed medical resources and the continuously upgraded multi-level health demands continues to escalate. Digital health emerged in response and quickly accumulated traffic during the epidemic (as of December 2022, the scale of internet medical users in China reached 0.363 billion, a year-on-year increase of 21.7%), but also exposed weaknesses in service experience (limitations, singularity, quality levels), and difficulty in monetization (weak willingness to pay for C-end services but high medical costs). With the commercial penetration of GPT-4 and the "Wenyin" model in the medical field, digital health is expected to usher in new opportunities.
AI + inquiry consultation: Online consultation is an important supplement to offline diagnosis and treatment, divided into health consulting and online consultation.
AI + Health Consulting can not only improve professionalism and accuracy, but also enhance interactivity and even provide humanistic care, improving the experience of "light inquiry".
AI+ online consultation brings a dual improvement in 'efficiency' and 'effectiveness', efficiently generating concise and accurate chief complaints through pre-diagnosis AI communication and extraction of historical health records data, and accurately recommending doctors through comparison with similar cases. As an online assistant during diagnosis and post-diagnosis, the enhanced service experience is expected to strengthen the willingness of end users to pay, while saving doctors' time is beneficial for cost control.
AI+ Health Management: The domestic 'internet plus health management' has experienced a transformation from species explosion to intensified traffic competition to elimination and integration.
The main reasons for the development bottleneck include low trust in platforms and related data, as well as fragmented and excessively standardized services. The introduction of AI is expected to improve data accuracy and continuity (continuous data collection through smart wearable devices, combined with patient hospital visit data records), provide professional personalized health services (AI doctors/nurses), and create more possibilities (brain-computer interface provides assistance in movement and neurological rehabilitation, improving the quality of life for disabled patients).
AI+ offline assistance in medical treatment:
AI-assisted outpatient clinics can enhance patient experience, reduce medical treatment time (through AI-assisted outpatient clinics, the average waiting time for patients at Shanghai Children's Medical Center has been reduced from about 2 hours to 0.38 hours), and also reduce doctor's information input time to allow them to focus on diagnosis and prescriptions.
AI-assisted follow-up (batch calling patients via dynamic voice calls → real-time conversion of voice messages into text tables → automatically generate reports uploaded to the cloud) enhances the depth and effectiveness of doctor-patient communication.
Virtual nursing supports virtual hospitalization, virtual rounds, and virtual discharge workflows through indoor sensors, artificial intelligence, and automatic document capture.
One-stop accompaniment helps patients complete the entire process from appointment, navigation, queuing, medical consultation, health education, examination, medication collection to post-discharge follow-up and reminder for revisit all through a smartphone, achieving one-stop service for medical treatment.
Investment advice:
It is recommended to focus on internet health companies that have a certain amount of traffic and data foundation, and actively introduce AI models, such as JD Health (06618), Ali Health (00241), Ping An Good Doctor (01833), WiseHealth (09955), Baidu Lingyi Zhuihui, WeDoctor, Chunyu Doctor, Haodf Online, Weimai, etc.
Risk Warning: Risks include weak willingness of individual customers to pay leading to commercialization below expectations, technological iteration, generation of incorrect information, data security, market competition, weak monetization capabilities, regulatory policies, etc.
