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In the past few years, the digital transformation of healthcare has entered the deep-water zone. New technologies and tools are being combined with new software to respond to major public health emergencies.

Zhang Yu, vice-president of Tencent HealthCare and head of the Tencent Cloud Software Development Effectiveness and Efficiency Improvement Taskforce has been working on this for quite some time. His speech at the 2023 Techo TVP Developer Summit shed light on the digital transformation of software development in this field.

Limited software development effectiveness and efficiency hampers development of the healthcare industry

"Software development effectiveness and efficiency" emerges in response to the fact the innovative performance of an industry is dependent on its digital capabilities, which reflects the effectiveness and efficiency of IT products.

In the healthcare industry, applications are updating at a faster rate, providing users with around-the-clock access to services. A relatively "static" software development model is unable to meet rocketing demand for information and services.

Specifically, unstandardized software development results in efficiency variation and unsatisfactory transition from one procedure to another, thus delaying delivery; the various tools that come with the digital transformation of healthcare are similar to each other and are underperformers in terms of stability, user experience, automation as well as application value; without a unified platform and uniform standards, software development is largely a self-contained, rigid and fragmented process, which is unsustainable in the long run.

Cloud-native DevOps (development and operations) takes advantage of the automation of software development. This model enables developers to focus on writing code and leave the platform to run automatically. This model, allowing for quick iterations, is also a solution to limited "software development effectiveness and efficiency". However, as the codebase gets bigger, enough streamlined and intelligent tools are needed to maintain software development quality.

Tencent Cloud: Build an all-in-one platform

In response to limited software development effectiveness and efficiency, Zhang Yu discussed the platform developed by Tencent Cloud. The platform brings together automation tools, an all-in-one portal and DevOps methodology to automate software development process and measure applications against uniform metrics. The resulting product is an all-in-one DevOps platform.

The Tencent Cloud platform employs a large number of software development tools to unite Tencent Cloud storage, account access and cost settlement, and coordinate monitoring and logging among other modules, thus paving the way for efficient software development.

In Zhang Yu's view, Tencent Cloud puts more emphasis on the value metrics of software development. Traditional value metrics are relatively abstract and distorted, such as the number of new users and revenue growth a request can generate, the service interruption and loss a code change will cause and the risks a zero-day vulnerability will bring to business and customers.

The platform extends the sense of satisfaction of software developers by improving their experience, and enhances software development effectiveness and efficiency by creating a coordinated, standardized process. In addition, a clearer visual interface and explicit value metrics also motivate IT groups to make improvements and realize sustainable development.

Promote software development effectiveness and efficiency-induced innovations

The approach proposed by Tencent Cloud is widely adopted in its healthcare business.

The system enables Zhang and his team to employ advanced digital technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data in the healthcare industry, so as to develop innovative products that benefit physicians, patients and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

In terms of AI-assisted healthcare, Zhang and his team developed a triage and consultation platform based on technologies like speech recognition and language comprehension. The platform, covering 31 departments and 98 percent of diseases, has shortened the time and improved the accuracy of triage. In total, the platform has provided 2 million intelligent triage and consultation services to 1.5 million patients, with an accuracy rate of 91.7 percent. In this way, the platform could be a solution to the imbalanced distribution of China's healthcare resources. More than 900 medical institutions have adopted the system, and it has substantially improved the productivity of physicians.

Zhang and his team have also developed an intelligent diagnosis and treatment support system by building knowledge maps of key diseases such as psoriasis, heart failure, chest pain and stroke, to assist physicians in analyzing images and finding the information they need. The accuracy rate of the system in terms of decision support is 90 percent, and can more accurately evaluate the severity of psoriasis than clinicians.

In developing China's first artificial intelligence-based disease management platform for patients with heart failure, Zhang and his team used explainable AI technology to warn of disease deterioration, AI-assisted gait analysis to classify the degree of heart failure, and big data to analyze the clinical effect. This platform, an outcome of the strategic cooperation between Novartis and Tencent, connects physicians, nurses and patients, supports AI technologies and performs core functions such as daily indicator monitoring, health status assessment and personalized recommendation. Since its official launch in July 2020, "HeartCare" has been used by more than 3,000 medical professionals in more than 500 hospitals, and has assisted nearly 80,000 heart failure patients in managing their disease at home and reduced their hospital visits.

The Tencent Healthcare Big Data Middle Platform is a patented big data software product. It provides access to medical big data and acts as a data collection and processing framework.

One of the digital healthcare platforms, which is equipped with a cutting-edge game rendering engine, presents cinematic-quality graphics. The software analyzes important data such as outpatient registration volume, physician workload and drug consumption, and the results can assist medical institutions in formulating work plans and making drug storage decisions. The software can also monitor patient load on each floor and department as well as their condition. It visualizes the distribution and occupancy of beds, and calculates indicators such as bed utilization rate, bed turnover rate, and average length of stay.

According to Zhang, to further enhance software development effectiveness and efficiency, priority should be given to building a positive cycle among practice, platform and metrics, which together constitute a flywheel of effectiveness and efficiency. The DevOps model still has a lot of room for improvement. For instance, interoperability across the whole chain has to be strengthened to improve collaboration efficiency; solutions have to be formulated based on multiple perspectives and applicable to multiple scenarios so as to boost the productivity of major roles.

For the healthcare industry, the overall improvement of software not only contributes to its digital transformation, but also allows for closer integration between the upstream and downstream of the industry chain. Most importantly, giving priority to software development promotes the digital transformation of the whole process, which is at the core of elevating digital service quality and motivating enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency while moving toward a digital future.