Using AI to break the "check-and-forget" predicament, iKang teams up with Huawei to address the "health debt" of working professionals.
Overtime work, sedentary lifestyle and constant emotional stress have become the daily norm for modern office workers.
According to statistics from iResearch, more than 70% of office workers have three or more "red flags" in their physical examination results; easy fatigue, poor sleep, hypertension, hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, nodules and cervical spondylosis have almost become the "standard configuration" for office workers. In particular, the group of office workers aged 31 to 35 has become a high-incidence area for nodules.
Behind these figures lies an awkward reality: the vast majority of people only pay attention to their health status the moment they receive their annual physical examination report. The report is stored in the mobile phone, and after checking several marked abnormal indicators, it is put aside. Right after the physical examination, the health management process that was supposed to start has already ended.
This also leads to a fragmented situation in the workplace health management of "office workers": enterprises are responsible for purchasing physical examination packages, medical institutions are responsible for conducting examinations, and the rest is left for employees to handle on their own.
So, is there a possibility to make health management no longer just a once-a-year ritual, but truly integrated into daily life and receive continuous attention?
Recently, iKang tried to give the answer through the "AI Life Exhibition" held at Langyuan Station in Beijing. This exhibition, which integrates medical science popularization, technological experience and avant-garde art, presents health risks and active health concepts to the public in a vivid way.
Site of the iKang AI Life Exhibition
36Kr noticed that an immersive workplace health experience space based on the "Health Service Office" was specially set up at the site of the "iKang AI Life Exhibition", covering six functional areas: intelligent detection, health management platform, first-aid drill, health consultation, psychological care and rehabilitation physiotherapy. At the "High-Quality Development Exchange Meeting for Employee Health in the AI Era" held concurrently with the exhibition, the health management intelligent body jointly built by iKang and Huawei Cloud was officially unveiled. With the help of AI, it creates a full closed-loop service of health management of "health file creation → plan customization → personalized intervention → dynamic monitoring → intelligent warning", providing a feasible technical path to solve the long-standing problem of "valuing examination while neglecting management" in the workplace health industry.
At the moment when the large model wave is sweeping across all industries, the big health industry is also undergoing profound changes. From the perspective of ordinary office workers, can AI really resolve the accumulated "health debt" of working people?
From once a year to online every day, AI fills the "time blind spot" of annual physical examination
For the vast majority of people, annual physical examination is more like a once-a-year "health snapshot". But the biggest limitation of the snapshot is that it can only capture the physical state at the moment of the examination. During the long year between two physical examinations, blood pressure fluctuations, continuous deterioration of sleep, and indicator drift caused by stress are all in the monitoring vacuum. Many chronic problems are quietly aggravated in this unattended time window.
Due to limited manpower and high cost, in the past, it was difficult for "office workers" to achieve regular health tracking. The intervention of the workplace "Health Service Office" and the support of AI are breaking the dual limitations of time and manpower.
Workplace Health Exhibition Area of the iKang AI Life Exhibition
The integrated service model of "risk screening - daily monitoring - intelligent assessment - precise intervention - continuous follow-up" can be experienced one by one at the workplace health exhibition area of this "iKang AI Life Exhibition". This standardized "Health Service Office" can be directly deployed inside the enterprise park. Employees can use the fragmented time during lunch break to complete the detection of more than ten core physiological indicators such as blood pressure, blood glucose and electrocardiogram, and the detection data will be imported into the personal dynamic health file in real time.
In addition, when the system identifies a continuous abnormal fluctuation of indicators, it will actively trigger a risk reminder, so that people no longer need to wait for the next year's physical examination to find the alarm of their body.
Zhang Ligang, Founder and CEO of iKang Group, introduced that from his observation, in the actual implementation process, the construction of conventional health detection equipment and first-aid systems, as well as employees' mental health, have gradually become rigid demands of enterprises.
"For example, under our suggestion, many enterprises are equipped with defibrillators and regularly train employees to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). For enterprises with outdoor operation scenarios such as the State Grid system, we will also suggest employees to do electrocardiogram examinations before outdoor operations to prevent sudden cardiac risks caused by abnormalities such as atrial fibrillation and premature beats, and ensure the life safety of operating personnel. At the same time, as the "three highs" problem in the current workplace is very common, many enterprises hope to provide more convenient testing for employees. We will equip corresponding equipment in the "Health Service Office" as needed, and the on-site medical staff will also focus on employees with health risks and regularly track them to adjust their lifestyles."
Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) First Aid Training at the iKang AI Life Exhibition
According to data from iKang, it has now covered more than 30 cities, built 178 workplace health promotion centers / health service offices, serving hundreds of thousands of enterprise employees.
The value of this model lies not only in improving convenience, but also in solving the pain point of long-term fragmentation of workplace health data. In reality, physical examination data is stored in the system of the physical examination institution, sleep heart rate data is stored in smart watches, and diet records are scattered in various apps... Data from different sources are isolated from each other, which cannot piece together a complete personal health profile, and the subsequent health judgment naturally loses its foundation.
The core mission of the workplace "Health Service Office" and dynamic health files is to form a continuously updated personal health baseline. Only by building this complete data base can AI carry out risk identification with practical reference significance, so that health monitoring can shift from the annual "snapshot" to the "dynamic image" of all-weather continuous recording.
"AI does not define life, but helps people understand life." Zhang Ligang explained the positioning of AI in the health field. The value of technology is to make those originally invisible health risks visible, and visibility is the starting point of active health.
Say goodbye to the "one-size-fits-all" approach, AI understands office workers better
When the dynamic health file completes the collection of various health indicators, a new problem emerges: even if employees see their own health risks, it is still difficult to implement medical suggestions in the workplace reality of normalized overtime, sedentary lifestyle and frequent takeout eating in reality. The public does not fail to understand the importance of health, but it is difficult to get an improvement path that adapts to their own work situation and is truly executable.
Traditional health management is difficult to resolve this contradiction. Facing hundreds of enterprise employees, it is difficult to achieve personalized customization for each person by relying on manual work, and only health guidance based on standardized templates can be output.
The health management intelligent body and full-process joint solution jointly created by iKang and Huawei Cloud aim at the key gap of "data input to personalized solution output". It will not only simply read the abnormal values on the physical examination report, but also call all the information of the dynamic health file, and incorporate multi-dimensional information such as post attributes, daily work and rest, sleep and heart rate collected by smart wearable devices into the calculation.
The health management intelligent body and full-process joint solution jointly built by iKang and Huawei Cloud were officially unveiled
Talking about why to upgrade this solution, Zhang Ligang said that the core demand of workplace health is to deliver the "private doctor service" that only a few people could enjoy in the past to ordinary enterprise employees on a large scale through AI. "iKang holds 80 million compliant physical examination data accumulated over years and practical experience in full-scenario health management, and Huawei Cloud outputs strong capabilities of medical logical reasoning, authoritative guideline analysis and intelligent retrieval. The combination of the two can make the intelligent body better understand the physical signals of the workplace population."
It is worth emphasizing that after the AI generates the intervention suggestions, it will also be manually verified. Zhang Ligang clarified three bottom lines: all core systems are deployed on private cloud and have passed the Level 3 certification of the national information security level protection; unless it is a real-name testing project required by national regulations, all third-party testing samples are submitted for testing with codes without real names, to maximize the protection of user privacy; all solutions generated by AI are manually reviewed and issued by professional doctors, so as to balance the large-scale efficiency of the intelligent body and the rigor of medical services.
For a long time, the health management industry is highly dependent on human experts. To achieve large-scale implementation, standardization is required, and personalization often means high cost. The arrival of AI is rewriting this equation. Relying on the health management intelligent body, AI completes a large number of initial screening and draft of the plan, and doctors focus on review and key decision-making, making a health management model that combines professional reliability, large-scale implementation and individual customization a reality.
"AI is like the aircraft navigation system, and medical professionals are the captain. Navigation can complete massive calculations and risk warnings, but the captain must be the one who makes decisions and executes in the end." Zhang Ligang believes that the cooperation between the two can better complete health management.
Enterprise workplace health: from "welfare procurement" to system construction
When AI completes the closed loop of personal-level data filing, risk assessment and personalized intervention, this digital capability is further extended outward, which is promoting a paradigm shift in the enterprise-side workplace health service model.
Looking back at the development of domestic workplace health, the industry has roughly gone through two stages. In the first stage, enterprises hardly intervened in employee health management, and all responsibilities were handed over to individual employees. In the second stage, enterprises took group annual physical examination as a standard employee welfare, and the completion of procurement was regarded as the completion of delivery.
Nowadays, AI technology is pushing the industry to move towards the third stage, which takes physical examination as the entry point, and builds a full-cycle active protection network of "personal health data filing - personalized intervention implementation - empowering enterprise organizational health capability" with the help of large models and smart hardware.
The practical necessity of this system construction is particularly prominent in sudden workplace health incidents. A more and more prominent example in recent years is that most enterprises equate health management with physical examination and science popularization, ignoring the potential life safety risks in the workplace. Sudden incidents such as cardiac death induced by overwork require enterprises to have both normalized health risk management and control capabilities and on-site emergency disposal capabilities, both of which are indispensable.
In the solution given by iKang, the workplace "Health Service Office" has taken the construction of first-aid capability as an independent module. From regular training of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), configuration of equipment such as AED and first-aid kit, to the construction of three-tier personnel echelon of safety volunteers, first-aid personnel and first-aid experts, and then to regular practical drills, a complete response mechanism has been formed.
iKang focused on introducing the "13520" rescue criterion implemented by a technology giant it serves, which is very valuable for reference: after an employee suddenly falls to the ground, the surrounding personnel call for help and start rescue within 1 minute, the security personnel arrive at the scene within 3 minutes, the on-site medical staff arrive and carry out rescue within 5 minutes, and the ambulance arrives at the scene within 20 minutes. "Regular training is required. Even if no one falls down, drills should be carried out to ensure the normal operation of the system."
These preparations may not be used in normal times, but once an emergency occurs, the difference between having and not having the system is the difference between life and death.
In terms of policy, the "15th Five-Year Plan" for National Health issued by the State Council has clearly put forward that it is necessary to "strengthen the monitoring of chronic diseases and their risk factors, develop the whole-chain service of prevention, treatment, rehabilitation and management, and improve the system of early screening, early diagnosis and early treatment", as well as "promote the construction of healthy enterprises" and "improve the comprehensive prevention and control strategies for work-related diseases".
In other words, the national policy orientation is changing from "centered on treating diseases" to "centered on people's health". At the same time, the "pilot project for high-quality workplace health management" is also being promoted nationwide, and iKang has become one of the first batch of pilot units selected.
For enterprises, this means that employee health management is no longer just a "welfare option", but a "rigid demand configuration". Zhang Ligang also emphasized: "Employee health is the foundation for the continuous development of an enterprise. The long-term competitiveness of an enterprise ultimately comes from people. Only when employees are in good physical condition and stable state, can the innovation, execution and cohesion of the enterprise have a foundation. Therefore, continuous health management should not be regarded as an extra expenditure "beyond physical examination", but as a basic investment for the sustainable development of enterprises."
Policies are promoting, technology is advancing, and enterprises are implementing. For "office workers", the most practical change may be: in the future, when it comes to health, finally there is someone willing to take care of it for you.