Amazon Wants to Disrupt Health Care in America. In China, Tech Giants Already Have.<br />In all, more than 130 companies are applying A. I.<br />in ways that could increase the efficiency of China’s health care system, according to Yiou Intelligence, an industry consultancy based in Beijing.<br />“It’s fair to say that across the board, the Chinese tech companies have all embraced being involved in<br />and being active in the health care space, unlike the U. S., where some of them have and some have not,” said Laura Nelson Carney, an Asia-Pacific health care analyst at Bernstein Research.<br />Last year, Alibaba’s health unit introduced A. I.<br />software that can help interpret CT scans and an A. I.<br />medical lab to help doctors make diagnoses.<br />The sheer size of China’s population — nearly 1.4 billion people who could provide a vast number of images to<br />feed into their systems — provides a potential advantage for the development of artificial intelligence.<br />Lin Chenxi, who left Alibaba to establish the company in 2012, said he hoped to<br />use the technology to ensure equal access to medical treatment across China<br />Technology companies like Alibaba and Tencent have made health care a priority for years, and are using China as their laboratory.<br />It specializes in automated medical image analysis, helping eye doctors like Dr. Yu screen patients<br />for diabetic retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness among China’s working-age population.
