For much of modern medicine, care delivery has been defined by physical hospitals, in-person consultations, and tightly bounded clinical workflows. As digital platforms began entering healthcare in the early 2010s, the promise was scale and access, but the risk was fragmentation, medical error, and loss of clinical accountability. In China, where internet healthcare emerged rapidly after 2013, the central challenge was not whether online care could grow, but whether it could grow safely.
Dr. Xie Hong, a Senior Member of IEEE and one of the earliest medical leaders to enter the internet healthcare field, has spent more than a decade answering that question from the inside. With eight years of experience managing physical hospitals and nearly ten years directing internet hospitals, Dr. Xie is widely recognized as China’s first and most seasoned director of an internet hospital. Her work has shaped how clinical governance, AI systems, and digital workflows coexist at national scale.
“Technology can extend healthcare access,” Dr. Xie explains, “but medicine only works when responsibility, standards, and accountability are clearly defined. Without that, scale becomes dangerous.”
From Physical Hospitals to Internet Medicine
Dr. Xie’s career began in traditional hospital medicine, where she served for more than two decades at Nanjing First Hospital as Vice President, Director of the Quality Management Office, and Associate Chief Physician of Respiratory Medicine. This stage enabled her to be well-versed in medical professional principles and the red lines of laws and regulations, laying a solid foundation in patient safety, quality control and risk management long before digital healthcare became mainstream
When internet healthcare began taking shape in China around 2013, Dr. Xie joined the movement in its earliest phase.In 2014, Dr. Xie joined Ping An Health Internet Technology Co., Ltd. as the medical director and served as the president of Ping An Good Doctor Internet Hospital. He was also one of the earliest core medical experts and medical product managers in the Internet healthcare industry.
She is responsible for foundational work: building her own medical center team from scratch, designing a compliant online consultation and follow-up management product line with her colleagues from the industry and research, establishing a standardized diagnosis and treatment path for common symptoms and diseases on the Internet, and ensuring that doctors strictly follow the standards through systematic training and performance assessment. Under his leadership, Ping An Good Doctor Internet Hospital has established a complete three-level quality management system and passed the ISO9001 certification, setting an early industry benchmark for the quality and safety control of Internet hospitals.
Just as critically, she oversaw the design and operation of medical risk control systems and participated deeply in the development of AI-assisted diagnosis, Identification and management of high-risk cases, medication management, prescription review, electronic medical records, and complaint reporting systems. These were not experimental features, but safety infrastructure meant to support real patients at scale.
Defining Safety at Platform Scale
By the time Dr. Xie joined Baidu Group as Chief Medical Officer of Baidu Health in 2021, internet healthcare had moved from novelty to national infrastructure. Baidu Health operated at massive user volumes, where even minor clinical inconsistencies could translate into systemic risk.
Dr. Xie established an in-house physician team responsible for diagnosis and treatment safety and took charge of medical risk control across Baidu Health, Baidu’s AI-enabled healthcare platform built on its search capabilities and health-content ecosystem, where the company has reported more than 100 million daily users and an average daily health-content search volume of 200 million, supported by 300,000+ participating doctors. She optimized online consultation workflows, formulated standardized treatment protocols, and built a follow-up management organization to be fully responsible for the operation of online medical services and the control of medical risks. This effort culminated in the creation of the “Baidu Health Family Doctor” brand, integrating consultation, follow-up, and continuity of care.
One of her most significant contributions was the development of an AI-driven triage model that achieved accuracy above 96 percent. Rather than replacing physicians, the system improved patient routing and pre-diagnosis, ensuring users reached appropriate care pathways efficiently and safely. Combined with comprehensive monitoring of consultation volumes and standardized clinician behavior management, the platform achieved zero medical errors during her tenure.
“AI in healthcare should narrow uncertainty, not amplify it,” Dr. Xie notes. “Every algorithm must serve a clinical purpose and be accountable to medical standards.”
She also promoted the construction of an AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment system, participated in the generation of AI drug instructions, guided the establishment of various data evaluation standards, and set up a data annotation center. In the AI era, she aims to create a digital doctor who is always by your side. In 2025, Baidu’s “AI Health Manager” was successfully launched, aiming to create the preferred health content and decision-making platform for Chinese people. Her role spans three dimensions: medicine, technology, and industry-research collaboration, ensuring that innovation always centers on patient safety.
From Digital Health to Global Biotech
In 2024, Dr. Xie expanded her leadership scope by joining Boston Easy Biotech as Chief Technology and Medical Officer. In this role, she serves on the executive leadership team, aligning clinical strategy with biotech innovation across biosimilars, recombinant hormones, and bioinoculants.
She oversees clinical development, establishes safety and validation protocols, and ensures compliance with global regulatory bodies including the FDA and EMA. Her work requires close collaboration with R&D, quality assurance, regulatory affairs, and external partners, as well as clear clinical communication with investors and stakeholders.
This transition reflects a broader arc in her career. Having helped define how internet healthcare operates safely at scale, Dr. Xie now applies the same rigor to biotech development, where regulatory precision and clinical credibility are equally non-negotiable.
Clinical Governance as the Real Innovation
Dr. Xie’s influence extends beyond operations. She was a featured speaker at the China Health Service System Innovation Summit in 2021, where she shared insights on the integration of AI, internet hospitals, and clinical governance. Her perspective emphasizes that the hardest problems in digital health are not technical, but structural.
“Systems fail when responsibility is unclear,” she says. “The future of healthcare depends on whether we can embed medical judgment into every layer of technology.”
Her work illustrates a core truth of internet healthcare. Sustainable innovation does not come from algorithms alone, but from the invisible frameworks of standards, monitoring, and accountability that protect patients while enabling scale.
Today, as platforms race to deploy AI-driven diagnostics and global biotech firms push toward faster development cycles, Dr. Xie’s career stands as a reminder that progress in medicine is measured not only by reach, but by trust. In recognition of her expertise across technology, healthcare, and evaluation of complex systems, she also serves as a Business Intelligence Awards judge, contributing her clinical and strategic judgment to the broader innovation ecosystem.
In a field where mistakes carry human consequences, Dr. Xie has helped ensure that digital healthcare grows not just bigger, but safer, smarter, and worthy of the trust placed in it.
