IN the eastern city of Hangzhou, an ambulance sped through traffic on a wave of green lights, helped along by an artificial intelligence (AI) system and big data.

The system, which involves sending information to a centralized computer linked to the city’s transport networks, is part of a trial by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. The Chinese tech giant is hoping to use its cloud and data systems to tackle issues hobbling China’s health-care system like snarled city traffic, long patient queues and a lack of doctors.

Alibaba’s push into health care reflects a wider trend in China, where technology firms are racing to shake up the State-run health sector and take a slice of spending that McKinsey & Co. estimates will hit US$1 trillion by 2020.

Tencent-backed WeDoctor, which offers online consultations and doctor appointments, raised US$500 million in May at a valuation of US$5.5 billion. Ping An Good Doctor, a similar platform backed by Ping An Insurance , raised US$1.1 billion in an initial public offering this year.

“The opportunity is growing very fast,” said Min Wanli, the Hangzhou-based chief machine intelligence scientist at Alibaba’s cloud division.

Alibaba is working with a hospital in Shanghai using data to predict patient demand and allocate doctors. In Zhejiang Province, the company is working on AI-assisted diagnosis tools to help analyze medical images such as CT scans and MRIs.

“You need to go through very specialized training in order to read these images, but we know that experts are a very scarce resource,” said Min.

Chinese hospitals are increasingly using technology to bridge the gap between urban centers and remote parts of the country where doctors are in short supply. Using document-sharing systems and live-streaming video, specialists can direct more junior medical staff on-site doing patient diagnoses.

DXY, one of China’s biggest online networks of doctors, offers consultations on the WeChat social media platform for patients with chronic diseases such as diabetes, with a team of nurses and doctors providing medical advice.

China is pressing to reduce health-care costs that are soaring as the population ages, putting huge strains on the State insurance system.

At the same time, the government has been promising better access to health care and improved grass-roots care — despite a lack of family doctors — which has brought technology into the spotlight as a way of maximizing stretched resources.

“Educating doctors is going to take too long,” said Rogier Janssens, Beijing-based general manager of Germany’s Merck KGaA’s biopharma business in China. He added that smartphones could help deliver primary care faster and cheaper.

“There are hundreds of millions of people who still go without care for relatively simple diseases.”

China has enacted legislation over the last two years that has included strong support for Internet-based basic health-care services.

Premier Li Keqiang said this year that health-care tech could “help alleviate the problem of inaccessible and expensive public health services that have long been a big concern.”

Now, China may be about to approve the sale of some prescription drugs online, creating a major opportunity for local and global firms, according to companies in the sector.(SD-Agencies)