louisehourcade Chapter 235 Intelligent Healthcare
Chapter 235 Intelligent Healthcare
Zuo Cheng opened the medical analysis report that Yu Ying handed him, his gaze lingering on the last page.
Of the more than 1,500 top-tier hospitals nationwide, fewer than 80 have already installed the Interstellar Brain-Computer Interface (ICI) device. The remaining 95% are waiting for something else.
Included in medical insurance.
He had seen this number before, but hadn't paid much attention to it. Brain-computer interfaces went from the lab to clinical trials in just two years, and from clinical trials to commercialization in another year—the progress was already quite rapid. However, the ceiling for commercialization is tied to medical insurance. A single interstellar neural network device plus surgery costs 300,000 yuan. Even with subsidies from 402 Hospital for the equipment, the patient's out-of-pocket expense would still be over 150,000 yuan. For most families, 150,000 yuan is not a small sum.
The medical insurance negotiations began six months ago. The National Healthcare Security Administration organized an interdisciplinary evaluation committee, whose members included neurosurgeons, health economics researchers, medical insurance actuaries, and clinical pharmacists. The evaluation dimensions included not only the clinical efficacy of the equipment itself, but also long-term follow-up data, health economic indicators, and comparative costs with similar alternatives.
Yu Ying participated in the entire evaluation process. Her role wasn't product promotion, but rather data presentation. She compiled all surgical cases from 79 hospitals nationwide that had already installed the equipment into a clinical report. The report contained three sets of core data.
In the first group, the average time from stroke onset to completion of surgery was reduced from 120 minutes in the traditional procedure to 40 minutes. In the second group, the rate of excellent functional recovery six months after surgery increased from 43% in the traditional treatment to 78%. In the third group, the average length of hospital stay was shortened from 28 days to 14 days.
The three sets of data correspond to time cost, clinical efficacy, and economic cost, which happen to be the three core dimensions of medical insurance assessment.
The evaluation committee held three rounds of discussions. The focus of the controversy was not whether the equipment was useful, but the reimbursement rate. According to the National Healthcare Security Administration's actuarial model, with a 60% reimbursement rate, approximately 80,000 new stroke patients nationwide each year could receive surgery, increasing annual medical insurance expenditures by about 12 billion yuan. This is a significant figure, but the evaluation committee reached a consensus in the third round of discussions: if stroke patients miss the golden treatment window, the subsequent rehabilitation and long-term disability care costs far exceed the cost of surgery. Early surgery for 80,000 patients would cost 12 billion yuan, but without surgery, more than 40,000 of these 80,000 would be permanently disabled, with lifelong care costs exceeding 200 billion yuan.
The accounts have been settled.
The National Healthcare Security Administration has officially announced that interstellar neural brain-computer interface surgery will be included in the Category B medical insurance catalog, with a reimbursement rate of 60%.
On the day the news was released, Zuo Cheng received a message from Han Lu on his phone: 117 top-tier hospitals had sent purchase orders for equipment.
He counted them. One hundred and seventeen.
Han Lu added: "Adding the 79 companies that already exist, we'll soon break 200."
This number was continuously updated over the next three months.
The Interstellar Neuro Emergency Version was officially released in the second week after being included in medical insurance. This was a targeted upgrade led by Yu Ying's team. The previous Interstellar Neuro system had comprehensive functions, but emergency scenarios require speed. The emergency version removed non-emergency functional modules, but retained the core capabilities of rapid brain signal acquisition and lesion localization. Combined with the real-time analysis of Tianyan Quantum Computing, it reduced the time from forty minutes to eight minutes for stroke patients to complete all assessments after entering the emergency room.
From forty minutes to eight minutes. Yu Ying didn't use any embellishments when giving her internal report; she simply presented these two numbers, and the meeting room fell silent.
What do eight minutes mean? There's a golden window for stroke treatment; every minute saved from onset to treatment can save approximately one million brain cells. The difference between forty minutes and eight minutes is thirty-two minutes, which translates to thirty-two million brain cells. These cells determine whether a person can stand up again or remain bedridden.
On the day the Interstellar NeuroEmergency Edition was released, the director of the emergency department at Peking Union Medical College Hospital was invited to give an online presentation. He used data from his department over the past two months: after adopting the emergency version, the average prognostic score for stroke patients in his department nearly doubled. At the end of his presentation, he made a statement that was recorded by the staff present and later widely circulated within the medical community.
"Eight minutes, for stroke patients, is the difference between getting back on their feet and being bedridden. Before, we were racing against time; now we have a tool that can race even faster than time."
Within a week, more than 300 hospital emergency departments across the country submitted deployment applications for the Interstellar Neuro-Emergency Edition.
The monthly production of brain-computer interface devices increased from 100 sets to 500 sets within two months. Fang Ze led the team to optimize the mass production process of the NX series chips and simultaneously launched a second production line. The cost per set of equipment decreased by 45%, from the initial 120,000 to 66,000. With 60% reimbursement from medical insurance, the actual out-of-pocket expenses for patients decreased from 300,000 to less than 120,000. 402 Hospital also established a special subsidy fund to provide additional assistance to patients with financial difficulties; the first batch of patients could actually pay as little as 50,000.
Three months later, more than 500 hospitals had signed contracts, covering one-third of the top-tier hospitals nationwide.
Overseas orders have surged simultaneously. Forty hospitals in Japan, twenty-five in South Korea, six in Singapore, and fifteen in Germany have signed contracts. While overseas markets lack health insurance subsidies, commercial insurance in Japan covers some costs, while in South Korea and Singapore, government health departments directly procure the goods. Germany adopts a hospital-in-house procurement approach, with several top university-affiliated hospitals conducting pilot programs, and those that pass evaluations gradually being included in the health insurance system.
Yu Ying prepared a projection report at the end of the third month.
"If all top-tier hospitals nationwide were connected to the Interstellar Neural Network, achieving 100% coverage, it could save the mobility of over 100,000 stroke patients annually." She handed the report to Zuo Cheng. "100,000 people standing up. This number is more convincing than any commercial metric."
Zuo Cheng stared at it for a long time.
He thought of Professor Gu Feng. That 63-year-old ALS patient had become the first volunteer in human history to upload his consciousness. His words in the digital world—about the meaning of life, about dignity, about whether a person still has the right to choose—overlapped with the image of 100,000 people standing up before him.
This is not a tech company's performance report; it's about one person doing something that enables more people to stand up and move forward.
Zuo Cheng wrote a line at the end of the document.
Each patient connected to the interstellar neural network will have a unique neural signal atlas. Once this data accumulates to a certain extent, it may open a new door.
As he finished writing that line, the system panel lit up in a corner of his consciousness. It wasn't something he actively summoned; the system popped it up automatically. The panel displayed the Civilization Perception Interface. On the map of China, a pillar of light representing the medical field was growing rapidly, its color changing from light blue to dark blue, and at the same time, a tiny fork appeared at the top of the pillar. The fork extended in the direction of a gray node on the branch diagram.
The outline of the ninth branch was clearer than the last time I saw it.