ABC Convergence Promotes West China Hospital to a New Era of Smart Healthcare

    13-04-2020

Data Brief

Unified Access to Nine Medical Applications

Supporting the Work of More than 1,000 Scientific Researchers

Maximum Service: 20,000+ Daily Outpatients and Emergency Patients

Meeting Information Requirement of the Next 3 to 5 Years

Related Products: servers, storage, cloud computing and big data

Related Solutions: technical solutions such as cloud computing and big data; industry solutions such as medical health; and SMB solutions such as medical care and public health

In the digital age, smart healthcare is becoming an effective way to lead the healthcare industry into a new, smarter stage. At West China Hospital of Sichuan University, cloud platform is building an efficient resource and data platform for patient diagnosis and treatment, scientific research exploration and hospital management. This century-old hospital is embarking on a digitally empowered path of medical and technological integration and innovation.

From a western clinic” in 1892 to today’s medical institution with complete disciplines, exquisite medical technology, advanced diagnosis and treatment equipment, and strong scientific research capabilities, West China Hospital of Sichuan University (WCH) has gone through over 120 years of hard work and endeavors to become a first-class hospital in China with world renown. Today’s WCH is not only the national center for the diagnosis and treatment of critical diseases in west China, but also a well-known higher medical institution and a national base for medical scientific research and technological innovation. It has ranked first on the “Ranking of Most Influential Chinese Hospitals in Science and Technology” for five consecutive years.

WCH can handle a maximum daily outpatient and emergency volume of more than 20,000 visits, and it also has thousands of scientific experts conducting medical research. Such a large business volume needs to be effectively supported by a digital platform integrating reliability and agile innovation. Its previous, scattered IT architecture was unable to meet the hospital’s clinical diagnosis and research needs. With the help of H3C, WCH applied advanced technologies such as cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence to build big data and medical cloud platforms, providing powerful digital support for its traditional business production, clinical medicine, scientific research and other business systems, so as to meet the current and future 3-5 years of medical information requirement, and help the hospital forward to the intelligent era

Innovative ABC Convergence Builds a New Architecture for Smart Healthcare

After careful business research and architecture evaluation, H3C planned a “1+N+N” architecture consisting of a portal (1), business platforms (N) and data centers (N) for WCH. With a comprehensive cloud platform, a customizable, unified portal, and a unified management model, it realized the flexible delivery of IT resources. In terms of overall planning, WCH adopted a three-step strategy: (1) in 2019, a cross-center medical big data platform was built to support clinical data center and scientific research data center business, and create a unified service entrance; (2) in 2020, based on the existing cloud platform architecture, the medical supercomputing cloud platform and the application micro service platform have been successively deployed to form the layout of "three cities, four centers", providing computing power for the research of disease pre-treatment plan, genomics and other clinical mass data analysis services; (3) based on the H3C PaaS platform , the transformation of some applications of micro services will gradually solve the information island, point-to-point delivery and other problems faced by the integration platform.

WCH’s big data and medical cloud project covered comprehensive changes such as cloud platform construction, mid-stage data deployment and smart applications, which presented a great challenge for the manufacturer’s converged delivery capabilities. Relying on leading technology and abundant experience, H3C built a complete cloud computing platform at a fundamental level using a UIS 3000 high-configuration server, a GPU server, a CAS virtualization platform, ONEstor distributed storage and a CloudOS cloud operating system. On top of this, H3C deployed a series of platforms and applications such as the DataEngine big data platform, the AIOS AI machine learning platform and customized portals. By aggregating its innovation strength in various fields, H3C has realized another perfect practice of ABC convergence solution.

Integrated Digital Technology Applications Drive Innovation and Improvement in Healthcare Services

Based on this medical cloud platform, WCH has realized the integration of 9 sets of applications, such as cloud management platform, smart medical treatment alliance management index analysis platform, scientific research workstation, and clinical big data search engine, etc., to provide external support through a unified portal platform, as well as single sign-on and unified authorization. Likewise, the centralized maintenance of user information and the unified management of permissions have improved the data security of WCH’s cloud. In addition, the horizontal interaction between subsystems has avoided the repeated operation of medical staff, effectively improving work efficiency and also providing future business systems a foundation for horizontal expansion.

At present, the big data platform of hospital has created tens of thousands of healthcare service model tables and summary tables. The largest table has ten million rows of data, and hundreds of computing tasks run simultaneously during peak periods. Starting from three aspects of data standards, data quality and data security, H3C helped WCH to build a comprehensive platform from the bottom resources to the data warehouse and then to the data application, so as to make a comprehensive analysis and processing on the basis of ensuring data security. Taking the common genetic sequencing done at WCH as an example, an entire genome test generates 200 gigabytes of raw data, and a complete sequencing generates at least 4 terabytes of data with an extremely low data compression rate. Thus, H3C solved resource wastage caused by the peak-valley effect and raised the resource utilization rate through the elastic resource scalability of the cloud platform. It also implemented the classification and storage of genetic data, which facilitated data analysis and processing.

In terms of AI-driven medical research, H3C helped WCH seamlessly connect data and AI platforms through unified AI services. It helped customers quickly build medical models and engage in technology-driven service innovation, which realized comprehensive visualization and lowered the threshold for AI development. In specific AI service scenarios, H3C has helped scientific researchers to quickly complete the training of automatic CT image detection models, making it possible for AI to assist doctors in making efficient diagnoses.

Facing a new era of smart healthcare with huge development and breakthroughs, WCH will continue to explore the deployment and application of innovative concepts such as micro services in healthcare scenario, continuously optimize and upgrade its digital architecture and business platform, and become the pioneer of smart medical era. As a leader in digital solutions, H3C will also continue to develop smart healthcare services based on its innovative strengths, contribute more power to the smart transformation of hospitals at all levels in China, and contribute to the smooth realization of "Healthy China 2030" blueprint.

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