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November 23, 2016

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Home » Metro » Health and Science

Medical sector is told to get with it

By Ma Yue | November 23, 2016, Wednesday | Print Edition

THE world’s medical sectors need to embrace technology to promote health, said the World Heath Organization’s leader.

Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general, who was speaking at the 9th Global Conference on Health Promotion in Shanghai yesterday, said: “I want to appeal to medical sector ministers, and even city governments, to empower people to use information and communication technology and put them at the front tier, so as to make medical sectors less conservative.”

Chan, who was wearing a step-counting device on her wrist during the conference, joined Li Yanhong, co-founder of China’s largest searching engine Baidu and Baroness Joanna Shields, the United Kingdom minister for Internet safety and security, at a conference seminar themed “Innovation for health — A vision into the future,” to discuss how information and communication technology (ICT) should be better used in promoting healthy lifestyle.

According to Li, Baidu receives 6 million health-related inquiries a day.

“Currently, not enough medical data can be collected for computer to analyze, as people still have privacy concerns when sharing information online,” he said.

“People tend to hold low expectation towards our role in medical area. Yet, we have capabilities that medical professionals are not aware of. Be more open-minded, and ICT will help in improving health.”

Chan added data sharing would be the key to finding solutions to health problems.

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