__25A02W90sJ.png)
Although Taiwan has a small land area, the population is concentrated in cities on the western side, leading to most public and private healthcare resources in major cities. This creates challenges for residents in rural areas, especially in the eastern part of Taiwan, where medical resources are limited, and access to healthcare is difficult. In this situation, developing smart healthcare is essential to bridging the gap between urban and rural healthcare, ensuring that rural residents have access to the same medical quality and services as those in cities.
Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, one of the few medical centers in eastern Taiwan, is implementing the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Health and Well-Being Technology Integration Program. In collaboration with the Haiduan Township Health Station in Taitung County, they are working to integrate healthcare resources in rural areas, enhancing the universality, accessibility, and affordability of medical services and improving overall healthcare quality.
The Health and Well-Being Technology Integration Program, based on a platform established in 2018 in Xiulian Township, has been expanded to Haiduan Township in Taitung County and Ji’an Township in Hualien County. By linking the Haiduan and Ji’an Health Stations with Guanshan, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital successfully created a household health registration system. Residents play a key role as health gatekeepers, recruiting health ambassadors for localized care services, integrating chronic disease management systems, cultural health stations, and community day-care centers, and creating a comprehensive healthcare network. This initiative is like building 30,000 hospital beds across Hualien and Taitung Counties, creating a hospital without walls.
Dr. Wu, Deputy Director of Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, explained that the Health and Well-Being Technology Integration Program focuses on three main goals: localizing healthcare, providing immediate emergency response, and fostering community-based care. It integrates services such as medical outreach, home care, disease screening, and public health education with the Taitung County Health Bureau, the Indigenous Affairs Council, the Social Affairs Bureau, and Tzu Chi Hospital. Residents only need to bring their National Health Insurance card to register, and medical staff can immediately access the hospital’s medical information system, retrieve electronic medical records, record data, conduct consultations, and prescribe medications. The required medications are simultaneously prepared by the hospital pharmacy. This eliminates the need for paper medical records during outreach visits, greatly reducing administrative procedures and improving healthcare delivery and quality of life for residents in remote areas.
At the start of the Health and Well-Being Technology Integration Program, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital encountered challenges connecting data with health stations. After evaluation, they decided to adopt the new generation international medical data exchange standard, FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), to enhance medical data interoperability between institutions, such as electronic medical records, hospitalization and discharge records, and referrals. This will become the standard for data transmission and storage at Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital in the future.
Mobility and Intelligence as Top Development Priorities
Under the spiritual guidance of the founder of the hospital, Master Cheng Yen, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital was successfully established in 1986 with support from various donors. With the collaboration of numerous healthcare professionals and volunteers, the hospital adheres to the principle of “respecting life” and has implemented patient-centered acute care and community healthcare services in the Hualien and Taitung regions. The goal is to provide appropriate care for patients, and in 2002, it was upgraded to a medical center. The hospital’s vision is to develop into a model international hospital centered around patient care. Its long-term goals include: “sustainable management to become a benchmark smart hospital,” “actively nurturing talent and promoting medical humanities to become an international medical education and training center,” “providing high-quality patient-centered healthcare,” “creating an excellent research environment to enhance innovation and development capabilities,” and “caring for vulnerable groups and fulfilling social responsibilities.”
In response to innovative medical technologies, Taiwan’s Tzu Chi Medical System has upgraded its HIS (Hospital Information System), and in recent years, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital has prioritized the development of mobile and intelligent solutions across three main areas: clinical care, patient services, and administrative management. Among these, clinical care has received the most investment and development. For example, the newly launched Smart Mobile Rounds App integrates electronic medical records, medical images, and lab data, enabling doctors to access clinical information accurately and efficiently on a unified platform. Additionally, the hospital pioneered the use of the Nvidia Clara platform to integrate computational models, creating a flexible AI application framework for medical imaging. When critical situations are detected in patient images, the system automatically alerts doctors for early intervention. The system also integrates a medication safety algorithm database, which provides automatic alerts for any critical values or medication safety concerns, effectively ensuring patient safety.
Dr. Wu pointed out that in terms of patient services, the hospital developed the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital Patient Services App, allowing people to access medical information, complete registration, track consultation progress, and make online payments, making it more convenient for patients. Regarding administrative management, the hospital has developed apps for check-in/check-out and scheduling, aiming to achieve digital transformation in administrative operations and improve overall efficiency.
Dr. Wu further mentioned that since the establishment of the AI Center, the hospital has actively developed AI-driven clinical services, such as acute myocardial infarction interpretation in cardiology, gastroesophageal reflux interpretation in gastroenterology, mammography interpretation in the radiology department, and tuberculosis imaging interpretation in pulmonology.
Establishing an AI Development Center and Launching Mobile AI Medical Services
In the process of saving lives, medical teams often have to race against time. To make the most of every golden minute for treatment, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital established the Artificial Intelligence Medical Innovation Development Center in 2020. The hospital adopted the world’s most advanced AI systems, including the NVIDIA DGX A100, NGC, and the NVIDIA Clara platform. Through collaboration with partners, they developed the EBM AI platform, integrated with the mobile rounds system, which consolidates all patient information into a single app. With multiple collaborations, the hospital extended the AI-assisted models, originally only available on desktop computers, to mobile devices. This allows medical and epidemic prevention teams to access AI-assisted treatment during rounds or anywhere, improving patient care and outcomes.
While focusing on mobility, real-time access, and intelligence, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital also ensures patient privacy and security. Every time a doctor logs in, the network password is different, and data is transmitted through SSL encryption, effectively protecting patient personal information. With multiple layers of security, the medical team can access real-time patient data, including vital signs, medication records, nursing records, ECGs, radiology PACS images, lab reports, and test results. Additionally, clinical alerts (CAS), critical lab values, high-risk medication notifications, and health insurance card annotations are integrated into the system to safeguard patient safety.
Dr. Wu noted that using innovative AI for mobile healthcare not only saves the medical team’s time but also helps patients better understand their conditions. The process of constructing and labeling medical images takes considerable time, but now, with the integration of the mobile healthcare system, doctors can use spare moments on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to label images. This allows doctors to view images directly in the consultation room or ward, and even outside the hospital via mobile devices. AI-assisted interpretation can help identify even the smallest lesions in real time, significantly benefiting patient diagnosis and healthcare quality.
It is also worth mentioning that Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, through Fengkang Technology, introduced Infinitix’s AI-Stack platform to efficiently coordinate and manage the priority use of DGX-A100 servers by AI engineers, preventing resource conflicts and maximizing the utilization of valuable resources. In addition, the user-friendly web interface, one-click NVIDIA MIG setup, GPU sharing mechanism, and storage management features make AI development more efficient for engineers, improving overall GPU utilization.
Expanding AI-Assisted Medical Scope and Promoting Smart Breast Cancer Screening Project
Since the establishment of its AI Center, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital has been actively developing AI-driven clinical services, such as acute myocardial infarction diagnosis in cardiology, gastroesophageal reflux analysis in gastroenterology, mammography interpretation in radiology, brain tumor metastasis via federated learning in neurosurgery, and pulmonary tuberculosis imaging in pulmonology. For example, in the AI Medical Smart Breast Cancer Screening project, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital partnered with NVIDIA, Bizbox, and the Institute for Information Industry (III) to jointly develop an AI-assisted mammography diagnostic and treatment process, integrating a complete set of medical services from patient screening in the mammography unit to the radiologist’s diagnostic report.
In this collaborative project, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital plays the role of integration and providing medical services and clinical data, while III is responsible for developing AI models for detection assistance. Finally, using the powerful computational capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX A100 system, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital’s data is used to train and update the AI models. This enables doctors to quickly and easily prepare AI training data and continuously update the breast cancer AI software, improving its accuracy.
“With the aid of technology, medical services become more convenient, intelligent, and precise. In remote areas with poor transportation, the expertise of medical centers can be brought to these regions, improving accessibility and accuracy of care. The collaboration in the AI Medical project is immensely helpful for both patients and doctors. For example, on the mammography vehicle, AI will alert the quality of the images and issue early warnings when potential abnormalities are detected, advising patients to revisit promptly and reducing delays in treatment,” said Dr. Wu. “The system will also automatically batch and prioritize mammography cases based on severity, allowing clinicians to review higher-risk cases first and ensure that patients receive treatment before their condition worsens. Additionally, the automatic lesion marking service assists doctors in reviewing images and alleviates the workload of clinical staff.”
Moreover, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital has also established a Big Data team and is advancing toward the creation of the Tzu Chi Big Data Database and even a data lake. On the application front, Power BI tools have been introduced for hospital-wide management of performance indicators.
Successful Development of Telemedicine Effectively Relieves Outpatient Pressure
Looking back at the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, which brought unprecedented challenges globally, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, after establishing its AI Center, promptly introduced NVIDIA’s NGC platform with COVID-19 research tools for AI detection in June 2020. This proactive measure enabled early deployment for detecting COVID-19 pneumonia, while also training an AI model aimed at identifying small tumors from liver CT scans.
As a leading hospital in eastern Taiwan, Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital had already invested in telemedicine services before the pandemic. However, prior to the outbreak, the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) and the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) only approved telemedicine services for remote areas like mountainous regions, offshore islands, and rural areas, with services limited to ENT, ophthalmology, and dermatology. With Taiwan entering the post-pandemic era, the hospital has aligned with central government policies, continuing to promote telemedicine and expand its applications. Now, the public can easily register online and consult remotely using the “NHIA Easy Access” app from the comfort of their homes.
Dr. Wu stated that currently, telemedicine services are available in 23 departments with 118 doctors, including infectious disease, dermatology, pulmonary medicine, cardiovascular and thoracic surgery, cardiology, rheumatology, nephrology, pediatrics, ENT, orthopedics, anesthesiology and pain medicine, neurosurgery, neurology, geriatric integrated care, occupational medicine, plastic and reconstructive surgery, colorectal surgery, urology, ophthalmology, family medicine, psychosomatic medicine, hepatobiliary and gastroenterology, and Chinese medicine.
During the pandemic, telemedicine played a crucial role in providing patients with timely medical services while preserving the hospital’s resources. It is expected that the Ministry of Health and Welfare will further expand the range of specialties eligible for telemedicine after the pandemic. Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital will continue to invest in and expand its telemedicine services, fully preparing for the challenges of the post-pandemic era through forward-thinking strategies.
