The source text is in Chinese. This English version is for reference only. In case of any discrepancy between this English version and the Chinese version, the Chinese version shall prevail.   

Hong Kong's smart healthcare development is entering a new phase. In recent years, the Hospital Authority has been actively introducing various artificial intelligence (AI) and telemedicine technologies, covering areas such as generative reporting and electrocardiogram analysis. These measures primarily target in-hospital clinical decision-making, patient triage, and treatment processes, aiming to expedite diagnosis, optimise ward operations, and reduce the administrative and monitoring burden on healthcare staff. At the same time, the government is driving smart healthcare development beyond hospital walls and across institutions, centred on the five-year "eHealth+" plan, progressively upgrading eHealth from an electronic medical record platform into a one-stop health platform encompassing appointment booking, referrals, record access, and chronic disease management. The former focuses on enhancing internal hospital efficiency, while the latter connects the entire care-seeking journey with health data. Only when the two are effectively linked can a complete smart healthcare system be established.

Breaking the Primary Care Data Deadlock

As of the end of February 2026, approximately 6.45 million citizens had registered on eHealth, covering around 85% of Hong Kong's population — a seemingly solid foundation. However, government data shows that although private healthcare providers account for over 50% of total eHealth record views, their rate of uploading medical records is less than 1%. In other words, the eHealth records of citizens who routinely visit private clinics are very likely incomplete, making it difficult to truly reflect an individual's medical history. To address this, the government launched a subsidy scheme in 2025 to encourage private institutions to adopt clinical management systems compatible with eHealth, and subsequently introduced a "simplified consent mechanism" that merges the registration and data-sharing authorisation procedures into one, thereby improving data completeness. While these measures are in the right direction, if eHealth ultimately serves merely as an "online medical record cabinet" for individual consultation reference rather than for systematic integration and analysis, its public policy potential will be difficult to fully realise.

Precise Data Collection to Support Policy Formulation

For smart healthcare to achieve real impact, the government needs to proactively collect data, focusing on specific, quantifiable health indicators to evaluate policy effectiveness and formulate population health strategies. Taking the "Chronic Disease Co-Care Pilot Scheme" as an example, citizens can already record their blood pressure and weight via eHealth. If the government could further integrate this data with district-level demographics and disease prevalence rates, it could establish a population health surveillance mechanism, gaining early insight into chronic disease trends across districts and achieving genuine preventive care.

The same applies to mental health services. Taking the "Healthy Mind Pilot Scheme" launched in 2024 as an example, if — with citizens' consent — pre- and post-treatment symptom assessments, follow-up attendance, and referral outcomes were uploaded, it could help the government more objectively analyse the clinical effectiveness and cost-efficiency of interventions, thereby determining which service models merit expansion. This would enable outcome-based resource allocation rather than reliance on intuition or individual case judgments.

In the process of data circulation, privacy protection is a topic of concern to all. Guangzhou's "Trusted Data Space" offers a viable approach. Under government coordination, medical data is anonymised and circulated under secure oversight to various healthcare institutions and research bodies, supporting clinical research and policy formulation. If Hong Kong were to establish a similar mechanism, the key lies in how to build clear authorisation mechanisms and de-identification standards within the framework of the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance, ensuring that data circulation and privacy protection proceed in parallel.

Artificial Intelligence: Building Hong Kong's Health Blueprint

Constructing a complete smart healthcare system may seem far-fetched, but looking at the present, it is not difficult to see that AI is already making a difference, particularly within the hospital system. A public hospital has piloted a patient risk early-warning system, and in its first month of trial, it successfully reduced average patient length of stay by approximately 25%, demonstrating that such AI tools can effectively enhance the quality of healthcare services. Furthermore, research has utilised Hospital Authority clinical data to build cardiovascular risk prediction models tailored to the local Chinese population, enhancing personalised risk assessment capabilities. If such models were applied for screening at the primary care level, high-risk groups could be identified earlier, achieving "early detection, early treatment." If in the future the application of these technologies could be shared between hospitals and the community through a standing experience-sharing mechanism, the overall benefits of smart healthcare would have the opportunity to grow exponentially.

Looking ahead, as the total volume of data received by eHealth continues to grow and the application of advanced technologies becomes more widespread and mature, the key to development will no longer be confined to raising technological standards, but will lie in data circulation and the integration of technical systems. Only through the proactive collection and analysis of health data can the value of smart healthcare be fully realised, building for citizens a complete health network spanning from hospital to community and from prevention to treatment.