AI + healthcare continues to be booming, and these three major directions are worth paying attention to!

Thanks to the widespread use of the DeepSeek large model and the investment mapping of related overseas themes, the AI + healthcare sector continues to attract capital market favor. Following Cathie Wood's bet on the AI pharmaceutical revolution, stating that healthcare is the most underestimated AI application, Cinda Securities also released a research report today analyzing the application prospects of AI in the healthcare field.

Data shows that last week, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector had a return of 2.71%, with a relative return of 1.53% compared to the CSI 300. Among the six sub-sectors, the one with the largest weekly increase was healthcare services, which rose by 6.51%; the largest increase over the past month was also in healthcare services, with a rise of 15.03%.

The AI healthcare market remains hot. On Monday, February 17, analysts Tang Aijin and He Xin from Cinda Securities released a report stating that healthcare is one of the important application directions for AI technology. For listed companies, effectively utilizing AI tools can improve efficiency and reduce costs, while also potentially launching products or services with disruptive innovations. They expressed:

“From a segmented perspective, we are particularly optimistic about three major directions: AI + diagnosis, AI + pharmaceuticals, and AI + healthcare services.”

AI + Diagnosis: Improving Efficiency and Reducing Costs

AI-assisted diagnosis is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. The report points out that its application covers multiple sub-fields, including pathological diagnosis, medical imaging, and gene sequencing, which not only improves diagnostic accuracy but also significantly enhances efficiency and reduces labor costs.

In November 2024, the National Healthcare Security Administration issued the "Guidelines for Project Establishment of Radiological Examination Price Items (Trial)," clearly supporting the clinical application of AI-assisted diagnosis. Analysis indicates that the project establishment guidelines uniformly arrange the expansion item of "AI-assisted diagnosis" under the main project of radiological examinations, executing the same price level as the main project but not duplicating charges with the main project, marking an important step forward in the commercialization of AI-assisted diagnosis.

AI + Pharmaceuticals: Accelerating Innovative Drug Development

Innovative drug development has always faced challenges such as long cycles, high investment, and high failure rates. The emergence of AIDD (AI Drug Discovery & Design) technology brings new opportunities to the pharmaceutical industry, applying machine learning, deep learning, and other AI technologies in the innovative drug development process, especially in the drug discovery phase.

Analysts point out that the application of AIDD in target identification, compound screening, and optimization is expected to significantly enhance R&D efficiency, shorten development cycles, and improve success rates.

AI + Healthcare Services: Reshaping the Medical Experience

The combination of AI and healthcare services is reshaping medical scenarios and behaviors. Cinda Securities notes that AI + healthcare services not only improves doctors' work efficiency but also enhances patients' medical experience. However, the issue of medical data silos remains a major obstacle to the development of AI + medical services. Analysis suggests:

"AI + medical service companies that can independently accumulate and collaborate externally to master medical data will have core competitiveness."