Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the global medical and healthcare community have made remarkable progresses, with the rapid development of economy, science and technology. However, dearth of medical resources worldwide and imbalance in the availability of regional medical services still remain as major issues. Being the world’s most populous country with 1.4 billion people, China faces huge challenges in the field of medical science and healthcare. Population aging has increased the incidence of chronic diseases significantly, with rising demands for health care, escalating supply-demand relations, and irrational allocation of medical resources. Meanwhile, developed countries in Europe and United States are also facing great healthcare challenges, including quality of medical service, timeliness of emergency services and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. The pandemic of COVID-19 thoroughly revealed the insufficient prevention and control modalities for emerging infectious diseases and public health emergencies. In this context, emerging digital and intelligent technologies have become a novel promising approach with the potential to improve post-pandemic global medical services.
President of Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital
Editor-in-Chief of Intelligent Medicine
Intelligent Medicine is proposed and defined as the most optimal “health ecosystem”, which incorporates the modern digital and intelligent technologies into whole process of healthcare practices. As a comprehensive healthcare system concerning entire population, all dimensions and mass professionals, Intelligent Medicine can improve the system in aspects of whole-element, whole-process and whole-chain, hence, aims to achieve high-quality, efficient and cost-effective healthcare.
From definitive perspectives, Intelligent Medicine will greatly empower the global health regarding following respects: (a), promoting and enabling a scientific “precision healthcare” for individuals and whole population; (b), conducing healthcare providers to establish “lean management” to elevate the cost-effectiveness; (c), optimizing the humanistic service and improving patients’ experiences and satisfaction to healthcare services; (d), expanding the time, space and areas of medical services. The “4E” effect of Intelligent Medicine, namely, Enhancement of capabilities, Efficiency improvement, Experience optimization and Extension of services, will be ultimately achieved.
Take emerging infectious diseases and public health emergencies as an example, Intelligent Medicine has been indispensable during the all-inclusive response to outbreaks and strong complementary for conventional public health measures. Featured by cutting-edge technologies, such as spatio-temporal big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and 5G network, Intelligent Medicine service system will surely help to prevent and control pandemic by means of epidemic monitoring, epidemic trend judgment, virus tracing, patient tracking, care for quarantined patients and follow-up for convalescent patients.
Artificial intelligence and other emerging digital technologies empower the global basic scientific research, applied clinical research and development of pharmaceutical devices. Intelligent technologies beyond the physical limits of scientists and physicians will upgrade and improve the efficiency of medical research and practices, such as artificial intelligence algorithm, wearable devices for wireless physiological monitoring and remote disease warning, intelligent robot for remote surgery, health management based on big data analysis, blockchain technology and deep learning imaging diagnosis. Therefore, Intelligent Medicine with intelligent perception, cognition, decision-making and operation will become a powerful driving force for innovation and progress in the field of healthcare. These technologies will be able to improve the awareness of diseases nature, endeavor the innovation of healthcare strategies and approaches, and eventually develop the growth of the mass health industry.
Currently, the global health and medical service system need to be empowered by intelligent technologies to gradually develop into a “health-centered” system, spanning the whole chain from disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment, rehabilitation, chronic disease management, elderly care, to hospice care. Therefore, Intelligent Medicine is going to be an important channel reshaping the global health and medical service systems in terms of integrating regional medical units to provide continuous healthcare services, and monitoring patients on the regional cloud platform remotely. Besides, the fundamental demand for national and international healthcare levels become a major mission of Intelligent Medicine, which will provide sustainable development potential to a nation.
Nevertheless, Intelligent Medicine still faces challenges. Exchanges of health and medical profiles or deposited datasets between institutions are suffocated due to lack of industrial standards or efficient technical solutions. Poor interpretability of artificial algorithms and prediction model results are inevitably producing unexplainable or incomprehensive documents. Personal privacies and data securities still need reliable computing techniques and data transformation. From legal viewpoint, there exists obvious mismatch between legal supervision and new technologies, outdated standards and regulations, alarming data security, and intractable privacy protection. In addition, the industry is in desire of sustainable and mature business models, as well as all-class talents for Intelligent Medicine.
With the aim of advancing the health of all humankind, Intelligent Medicine was created to build a new platform for global experts and scholars in multiple fields and disciplines to conduct academic exchanges and discuss achievements pertaining to Intelligent Medicine. Relying on the digital, network-based and smart healthcare ecosystem empowered by cutting-edge engineering technologies, the journal aims to pool global innovative ideas on Intelligent Medicine and gather the innovative achievements of scientific experts and academic scholars worldwide to protect human life and health, and open a new chapter advocating the community construction focused on a shareable future for humankind.