Big stride via big data

Li Zixiao is the director of the Quality Control Office of Nervous System Disease Treatment under the National Health Commission and also deputy director of the Vascular Neurology Department, Neurology Center, Beijing Tiantan Hospital.

He said he clearly remembers the suggestion of his supervisor Wang Yongjun ten years ago. "As a doctor and an expert, you can only receive forty or fifty patients a day. Or you can choose to work in medical quality control and research, promoting standardized diagnosis and treatment of cerebrovascular diseases across the whole country, so that hundreds of thousands of patients and their families can benefit."

Designated by the Medical Administration Bureau of the former Ministry of Health in 2010, Beijing Tiantan Hospital established the "National Quality Control Center for Cerebrovascular Diseases Treatment." The first difficulty at that time was the lack of a national data platform, so quality control work was based on limited understanding of the problem, just like the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The breakthrough came in 2012 when a national data platform was launched to register information on cerebrovascular diseases in 209 hospitals. The number of hospitals included in the platform jumped from 500 to 1,000, then 2,500, and now has 2,774.

Massive data collected through the platform is analyzed by supercomputers capable of 375 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), producing a clear picture of the current situation, progress and problems in disease diagnosis and treatment. Analysis shows that the composite indexes on medical services for cerebrovascular disease improved from 63 percent in the 11th Five-Year Plan to 76 percent in the 12nd Five-Year Plan, but challenges remained in fields of intravenous thrombolysis and anticoagulation therapy for atrial fibrillation. To address those issues, the center has helped the National Health Commission formulate and improve indicators, which can lower the chance of one-year recurrence for patients with cerebrovascular diseases by 28 percent, cut the risk of disability by 26 percent and reduce the number of patients suffering from recurrence by 43,000 a year, which also saves 400 million yuan in medical costs.