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Recently, an interesting development has occurred in the field of healthcare artificial intelligence (AI). The world’s largest health-focused AI app emerged from China, with over 100 million users. Ant Group’s AI-powered health app A-Fu has been helping clinicians in remote areas interpret medical reports and build health records for chronic disease patients. Other users are adopting it to query everyday health concerns, such as understanding medication labels and assessing symptoms. This development piqued our interest. 

There is no shortage of potential for AI in healthcare. From assisting doctors with tedious administrative tasks and accompanying patients in their medical journey to aiding pharma companies in drug discovery and supporting medical imaging diagnostics, there doesn’t seem to be a sector that the technology cannot disrupt.  

Even if these potentials have been put into practice in pilot or specific scenarios, their broad-scale adoption hasn’t been realised. China might be on the way to supercharge this uptake at a national level, implementing AI technology across its healthcare ecosystem for its 1.4 billion inhabitants. 

The country’s authorities have recently called for the broader adoption of healthcare AI across the country, with several regions working towards such implementation and investments funnelled in the same direction. We unpack the implications in this article.

China’s healthcare AI vision 

In late 2025, China’s National Health Commission and four other authorities issued a call for the broader application of AI in the country’s health sector. The vision is a bold one: AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment will be the standard across primary-level institutions for 900 million citizens by 2030. 

For institutions at or above the secondary level in the country’s three-tiered hospital system, AI will be deployed to support medical imaging diagnosis and clinical decision-making. Patient services, such as scheduling and triage, are also expected to integrate AI support.

This call isn’t merely an effort to brand a healthcare institution as being “AI-branded” but aims to bring positive change. For instance, this strategy aims to reduce misdiagnosis in primary care from around 40-50% to about 15-20%, reach 95% diagnostic accuracy in medical imaging, and close the gap between urban and rural healthcare access.

The Chinese authorities propose a phased implementation to enact this plan. In 2026, pilots for AI diagnostic tools are set for 50 hospitals and 500 township clinics. Each level of care is expected to have a unified national health database in 2027, leading to the nationwide accessibility of AI-assisted diagnoses in 2030. Within this 5-year timeline, an investment rollout of between $2-3 billion is planned.

Practical efforts towards China’s health AI strategy

China’s outlook on AI integration in healthcare goes beyond individual tools and considers the technology as a foundational element in the infrastructure of its digital health efforts. The country has undergone comprehensive reforms, with strong government policy and support, to support the digitalisation of its health sector. This has encouraged the adoption of digital health and health IT tools with stronger levels of data interoperability and system compatibility than in other jurisdictions. In contrast, other countries like the UK and the US that suffer from insufficient data integration and misaligned workflows can exacerbate challenges such as inefficiencies and misaligned priorities.

Chinese provinces are already heeding to the call for health AI integration. Among the most recent pilots comes from Jiangsu Province. In one of its cities, Suzhou, a personal AI health assistant has been deployed to personalise the health profile of citizens by analysing their annual physical examination reports and medical records. Also piloted in the city are AI GPs that have assisted over 5 million people in pre-consultations, diagnosis, and case and prescription reviews.

Several other regions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Henan and Hefei, have shared plans for their own health AI pilot projects. Such efforts are in line with the Chinese authorities’ call for broader implementation of the technology, and 2026 is looking to be a year rich in health AI pilots in the Far East.

The AI push from tech companies

This national incentive has also driven Chinese tech companies to accelerate the development of their AI models to get a lead in the health sector. Some have spent hundreds of millions of Chinese yuan on advertisements alone, while others have jumped onto the AI boom bandwagon to offer healthcare-facing models.

E-commerce giant Alibaba’s model dedicated for healthcare uses showed promise in 2025 when its benchmark scores indicated capabilities equivalent to experienced doctors. The model has been integrated into its consumer-facing AI assistant app, Quark. Another major Chinese tech company, Tencent, invested in healthcare AI projects. Its has developed several AI models for different use cases in this sector. For example, its Hunyuan model provides smart health checkup service, while its Qiyuan model helps train doctors to better respond in ICU situations.

Models from Chinese tech companies iFlytek, Quark Health and Baichuan Intelligence have proven their medical aptitude by passing the country’s National Medical Licensing Examination.

Large language models Doubao, Baichuan, Xiaohe, ChatGPT o1 and Gemini have been pitted against actual doctors, with promising results. During competitions, human doctors were found to perform better in the definitive diagnosis and treatment planning phase, while AI models could even outperform them in some cases.

How realistic is China’s health AI strategy?

The big, bold call from Chinese authorities has no equivalent in terms of its sheer reach, so it’s fair to have a layer of scepticism when looking at this ambitious strategy from the outside. 

With basic services being available for free, concerns arise regarding the return-on-investment for AI-assisted consultations. The developers behind such models require extensive resources, from high-quality training data to maintaining servers, to provide these automated tools. 

“When we discuss [business models] internally, there is a lot of controversy,” revealed Chen Liang, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Ant Group, revealed during a media briefing in December 2025. “We argued for a long time and, frankly speaking, there is no answer.”

This is a surprising admission, especially considering that Ant, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, has one of the most used health chatbots in the country, Ant Afu. But Liang believes in the long-term game. According to him, Ant Afu will help the ageing population, thereby creating value for society that will lead to a business model.

There are more hurdles than economic viability to overcome. Proprietary AI algorithms have to be explainable for healthcare usage. Frameworks for medical liability are unclear in cases of AI-assisted decision-making that conflict with clinicans’ judgement. Despite measures for interoperability, there are still fragmentation in the system to be addressed.

China’s phased implementation strategy might work towards a step-wise approach to address such hurdles while assessing the success of its AI implementation pilots. If the country achieves its goals within 5 years, the result might represent the biggest digital health transformation in the current era and a major move forward for healthcare AI. There will certainly be lessons learnt along the way, but these can inform the strategies of other jurisdictions as they pave their own AI-driven healthcare paths.

Written by Dr. Bertalan Meskó & Dr. Pranavsingh Dhunnoo

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