Sogou needs more hospitals for its CEO's 'digital family doctor' proposal

Search engine Sogou plans to cooperate with more hospitals as its next step to perfect its medical information platform, the Sogou Doctors, Wang Xiaochuan, CEO of Sogou, told chinadaily.com.cn on Tuesday.

Wang, who also is a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, proposed during the two sessions that the government include the internet in its plan to form medial partnerships that combine top-tier hospitals and grassroots hospitals. This inclusion would make "a digital family doctor for each family" possible within three to five years.

Wang said the government's plan in forming medical partnerships has made some progress but this plan has not taken into account many Chinese people's habit of searching for information online when they do not feel well.

In fact, there already is a concrete need for "authentic and authoritative" medical information online, Sogou Doctors, along with other online medical information platforms, such as Chunyu Doctors and DXY.cn, are here to meet this need, Wang added.

Although Sogou's artificial intelligence technologies can help patients get basic information on their illness and make the initial judgement on diagnosis, the "authentic and authoritative" information regarding which department of which hospital a patient should go to lies where the hospitals are, Wang said.

Sogou will try to add more hospitals to its Sogou Doctors platform and will keep running it on a nonprofit basis, he added.