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PREPARING FOR THE AI ERA UNDER THE DIGITAL HEALTH FRAMEWORK

Shan Xu ; Chunxia Hu ; Dong Min
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1
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1 China Academy of Information and Communication Technology (CAICT), China

ABSTRACT and limitations of AI for health has become more and more
necessary.
Information and communication technology (ICT) for health
has shown great potential to improve healthcare efficiency, 1.1 Health industry changes
especially artificial intelligence (AI). To better understand
the influence of ICT technology on health, a framework of The developing requirement for the health industry has
the digital health industry has been proposed in this paper. changed over the decades in terms of demand and supply.
Factors from the health industry and the ICT part are The gap between supply and demand is now increasingly
extracted to study the interaction between two groups of growing, waiting for new technological productivity to fill
component factors. Health factors include service and this gap. From the demand side, an aging population is
management; and ICT factors include sensors, networks, poised to become one of the most significant social
data resources, platforms, applications and solutions. The transformations in the twenty-first century, with implications
interaction between ICT and health can be traced through for nearly all sectors of society. According to data from
the development history, from the stage of institutional World Population Prospects: the 2019 Revision [3], by 2050,
informationization to regional informationization, and one in six people in the world will be over age 65 (16%), up
finally to service intelligentization. Following such a from one in 11 in 2019 (9%). This is especially directly
developmental roadmap, AI was chosen as one of the most reflected in changes of the population's disease spectrum.
powerful technologies to study the penetration effect and key Take China for example, the prevalence of chronic diseases
development trends from the perspectives of data, computing in the population over 65 years old is 539.9‰ [4], which is
power and algorithms. The health industry will be much much higher than for the entire population. For the future,
improved or redefined in the coming AI era. To better chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular
understand the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of AI diseases, cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, etc.
for health, exogenous factors are discussed at the end of the will become the biggest threat to public health. However, the
paper; preparations on collaboration mechanism; growth of supply resources lags much behind demand [6],
standardization and regulation have been proposed for the the situation is particularly serious for imaging, pathology
sustainable development of digital health in the AI era. and general practitioners. For example, the growth rate of
medical imaging data in China is about 30% per year, while
Keywords – Artificial intelligence, digital health, the annual growth rate of radiologists is only 4.1%, the gap
framework, information and communication technology, of pathologists is estimated to be 100 000[6][7], and it is not
interaction only limited to radiology. Training doctors takes a long time,
which means that the gap cannot be solved in the short term.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.2 ICT penetration into health
Health, as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO),
is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being The good news is that the arrival of the fourth industrial
and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."[1][2]. revolution has brought us ICT technology, which has
After decades of development, the demand and supply of the enormous potential to help overcome this socioeconomic
health industry have quietly changed. Complying with the challenge. Digital health refers to the use of ICT to help
industrial development requirements, information and address the health problems and challenges faced by people
communication technology (ICT) was introduced as a new under treatment [8]. Technologies such the fifth generation
technology which has great potential to improve healthcare (5G) communications, machine-to-machine (M2M)
efficiency, thus the digital health era has begun. Among communications, cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT),
those ICT technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) is big data, AI and machine learning(ML) etc. [9] will
regarded as the most powerful one with an unpredictable inevitably penetrate theinto health industry and lead to new
developing rate. To understand the strengths, weaknesses improvements in digital health services, from medical device
manufacturing to healthcare delivery, from medical research

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