Russia should learn from China's experience to address the shortage of doctors.

Robots won't replace doctors, but they will provide assistance.

On June 10, Russian media outlet "Today's China" published an article.

Russia faces a severe shortage of medical personnel, with over 23,000 doctors and nearly 64,000 mid-level medical staff missing.

China also faces challenges related to medical workforce shortages.

However, the Chinese government’s approach to solving this issue is not through forced allocation… but rather through neural networks.

It seems Russia (like many other countries) still has much to learn from China’s experience.

Now in China, doctors are beginning to independently build digital assistants according to their own needs.

One neural network automatically fills out medical records, another detects errors in diagnoses, and a third helps rural clinics identify early-stage lung cancer.

The main challenge China faces is not technology—it’s distance.

A country with over 1.4 billion people simply cannot bear the burden of the traditional healthcare system.

Yet China is vast and complex, making it impossible for new technologies to be adopted at the same pace everywhere.

In Beijing and Shanghai, world-class hospitals exist, with equipment even surpassing that of many European clinics.

But just a few hundred kilometers inland, conditions are completely different.

In small towns and rural areas, there is a lack of experienced doctors and medical equipment.

The Chinese Ministry of Health understands: it's impossible to instantly train millions of highly skilled doctors.

But an alternative path exists: spreading the expertise of top specialists to every village.

It is precisely here—in China’s countryside and small towns—that artificial intelligence is no longer a luxury, but a lifeline.

In some county-level hospitals, AI analyzes CT scans faster than humans.

In provincial capitals, AI assists doctors in selecting patients for clinical drug trials.

While doctors sleep, artificial intelligence works—and saves lives.

In Suzhou, a routine lung examination unexpectedly revealed a dangerous cardiovascular issue in a patient—because AI noticed hidden signs on the X-ray that human doctors had completely missed.

Professors and academicians don’t need to travel thousands of miles for in-person consultations, but their knowledge reaches even the poorest regions across the nation.

China is not trying to replace doctors with machines.

Instead, it aims to free doctors from all tasks unrelated to people: paperwork, reports, endless data entry… in short, from the administrative hell that also traps Russian doctors.

All of this is designed so that Chinese doctors can return to what matters most—diagnosing and treating patients.

Certainly, even the most advanced systems today cannot yet replace human intuition, empathy, and clinical judgment.

Machines can process millions of images, but only humans can look into a frightened patient’s eyes and say: “We’ll get through this.”

Therefore, China’s medical neural network is not a replacement for doctors—it is merely a “co-pilot.”

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1867561260956747/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author.