A Couple Of Things – Healthcare Innovation in China, and Pitching for Mental Health Equilibrium

A reflection on how technology is rebuilding healthcare at speed, while society is slowly rebuilding the vocabulary and validation around mental health.

The focus on physical, and mental health have not seen an equal distribution over the years. It could be the lack of knowhow at scale to see, sense, and understand the subtle and not overtly visible mental health conditions. In this piece, I reflect upon the progress we’re seeing in the areas of healthcare infrastructure and acceptance of mental health challenges. One is the progress we’re seeing in technology and innovation, and the other is in human behaviour, and the rise in the social understanding quotient. Read on!

From AI Kiosks To Agent Hospitals

With the growth in population globally, there’s been a tremendous growth in infections and viruses over the years. Some fatal, some on a short-term staycation, but all of them stretching the bandwidth of research scientists and doctors. Two countries with the largest population in the world—China and India have 3.07 and 1.23 doctors for every thousand people respectively. However, these ratios do not reflect the on-ground challenges, especially when met with adverse epidemics, natural calamities, and poor reach due to infrastructure and connectivity issues. It also has a trickle effect on the quality of care, and the efficiency of the overall system.

During one of my scrolls through the internet wilderness, I came across this video on AI-powered Health Kiosks that’s being rolled out in China. It is to healthcare, what ATMs are to banks. It takes care of routine and non-critical cases through AI-assist + self-checkout mechanism. It may not solve for the doctor to people coverage, but it’ll certainly ease off doctors’ bandwidth to focus on complex and critical cases. What I like about this model is that it can be deployed anywhere—malls, sidewalks, railway stations, etc. It’ll certainly have a learning curve, especially for the elderly population, but its scalability can enable a larger impact.

Another stride in delivering integrated healthcare came about with the launch of the world’s first Agent Hospital by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. It’s built on MedAgent-Zero, a self-evolving AI framework.
‘The system features 42 AI doctors across 21 clinical specialties, covering over 300 diseases. Furthermore, each specialty has trained its virtual agents on over ten common conditions. And finally, by creating a pool of half a million synthetic patient cases to test and evolve diagnostic accuracy. These AI doctors can treat 10,000 patients with 93% accuracy in a matter of days, a feat that would take real doctors years to complete. Furthermore, these doctors aren’t chatbots; they’re AI systems capable of autonomously working with AI generated patients in a fully-fledged closed-loop ecosystem.’
This is not a retrofit, but a shift in design thinking.

At the other end, DeepSeek AI, the open source LLM built in China, through its customized medical framework, is integrating with existing Hospital Management Systems (HMS). It is helping enhance operational efficiencies across patient admission, internal triage, documentation, and other alike processes.

While the Agent Hospital is rethinking the infrastructure of tomorrow, DeepSeek is bridging the future state with existing infrastructure—both of which is critical to tackle the vast opportunity in making healthcare accessible and appreciated.

A few years ago, while talking about technology and healthcare in the same line, one of the arguments doing the rounds, was the aspect of empathy and human touch—over-reliance on technology could rob the empathy out of a primarily human-centric experience. However, if anything, the advancements in AI in the past two years with the focus on voice and conversational elements has strengthened the empathy quotient of technology. It seems like we’re potentially gearing up for a world where EQ (Empathy Quotient) + IQ = quality care with speed, and at scale.

The Gratification Of Unseen Pressures

Caring for mental health is more recognized and appreciated, especially after COVID-19. However, mental health conditions have existed for a long time—some that are easier to diagnose and treat, and some unseen and unarticulated. People undergoing the condition would often cover up due to it being perceived as a social stigma, sign of weakness, and not enough knowhow around coping mechanisms. However, there’s been a significant change in the past five years, thanks to the conversations becoming mainstream on social media and public forums, individuals opening up in smaller cohorts and inner circles, and organizations creating support environments to enable strong allyship.

Earlier in the year, India beat Australia in the semifinals of the 2025 Women’s Cricket World Cup, and went on to win the finals to be crowned ‘World Champions’. A friend of mine shared the video of a press conference featuring Jemimah Rodrigues. While celebrating the wins, we often tend to cover up the struggles enroute. Jemimah touched upon the anxious moments and her mental state leading up to that semifinal game during the press conference. I’ve seen many sportspeople use the post-game press conference as a way to charm the journalists and media personnel with their humour, so that it can translate into Instagram reels. Jemimah’s address was real, heartfelt, and would be relatable to many struggling individuals playing any sport, and encountering moments like getting dropped from the team, not being given a fair shot, and getting pulled up for nothing.

It got me re-reading this excellent piece by Gideon Haigh from April this year, on Moises Henriques, a retired New South Wales > Australian International cricketer. If Jemimah’s struggles were off the field, Moises demons were on the ground, and not just restricted to the pitch. He was struggling with finding the motivation to play, unamused by the environment in the huddle, and caged by words that didn’t make any sense.

“They would say: “You’ve always got more time than you think.” Then they would say: “Take the game on.” Well, which was it? Next it would be: “Try to get them doing something they’re not comfortable doing.” Well, what are these “somethings” exactly? “Have a clear mind.” But you’re never going to have a clear mind: you’ll always be thinking something. “Go to your strengths.” What does that even mean? We were just saying words.” – Moises Henriques to Gideon Haigh.

He hit rock bottom during the Christmas of 2017, and reached out to psychologists and his coaches to work on the state of his mental health. Even a team sport can be extremely lonely, and professional work environments of any kind are not far-off in reflecting similar struggles every single day.

In today’s times, as more and more individuals across age groups are turning to AI to engage in conversations that they see fit for solely private screenings, I hope we still have humans in the loop to assure, as we keep working on the technology to mature.

Listen Up

Venus Isle by Eric Johnson from the album of the same name, released in 1996.

I’m forever on the lookout for tunes old and new, You can check out my expanding Trove Of Tunes that I’m curating in a Spotify playlist.

Cheers,

Shri