First standard

Gao Junwen, deputy head of the Anhui Provincial Health Commission, said there must be some standards hospitals can refer to.

To build an intelligent hospital, the USTC hospital released its own 47 pages of standards, which won recognition from the provincial authorities. "It is the country's first official standard for intelligent hospitals, and the national standard is expected to be drawn up using this one as an important reference," Gao said.

Yan said there should be standards for different levels of intelligent hospital. "A county level intelligent hospital can by no means be built with a standard for a provincial-level one," he said.

A recent article in the journal Chinese Digital Medicine, which is published by the National Health Commission, said there are still some technical difficulties to overcome in applying speech-recognition technology in diagnosis and treatment.

Written by a team of doctors from the General Hospital of the Guangzhou Command of the People's Liberation Army, the article said background noise and doctors' accents could affect the accuracy of the recognition process.

Speaking about a patient's health conditions in an office shared by several doctors also failed to protect the patient's privacy, it said, adding that solving the problem requires more investment to rearrange doctors' offices by, for example, giving them more private space.

As the intelligent healthcare business heats up, Lu said competition between companies is getting fiercer.

"Some of the firms act as if they can change the world overnight, while we believe making healthcare intelligent still needs great efforts to improve technology," Lu said.

"In the past, say about two years ago, some medical experts were too cautious about the business while some others' opinions on it were too negative.

"Nowadays, their understanding of the business is getting more rational - the current technologies are not perfect but they can be improved."

He said the business is very reliant on government support, because the authorities are always very cautious about the healthcare sector.