Zhangdian District Medical Consortiums × Huawei Data Storage: Bringing Healthcare Closer to Home

Located in eastern China's Shandong Province, the city of Zibo—home to approaching five million people and renowned for its distinctive barbecue style—has emerged as a regional leader in healthcare digital transformation. Indeed, its central district, Zhangdian, has already achieved remarkable success, modernizing the digital infrastructure of close-knit regional medical consortiums.

Four Challenges in Building Medical Consortiums

To advance healthcare transformation and deliver quality medical services to patients' doorsteps, China is accelerating the nationwide rollout of close-knit medical consortiums, which integrate small and medium hospitals in a region and facilitate the sharing of medical expertise.

However, realizing this vision has proven challenging due to legacy healthcare service and information systems that have created numerous digital barriers. In Zibo's Zhangdian district, the information systems of multiple medical institutions were isolated from each other, given different construction periods and standards. Bringing them into a single medical consortium faced four challenges:

Breaking down data silos: Heterogeneous aging systems and scattered functions made it difficult to unify scheduling, share patient records, and mutually recognize examination results across institutions.

Strengthening primary care: Limited medical resources and professionals at the primary care level, together with inefficient two-way referral mechanisms, continued to drive patients toward larger hospitals.

Accelerating digital and intelligent transformation: Weak digital foundations—only two hospitals in Zhangdian district had achieved Level 4 of China's national electronic medical record (EMR) standards—were insufficient to support growing demand for high-quality digital healthcare services.

Ensuring resilience and scalability: Legacy systems struggled to meet compliance requirements for data anonymization, encryption, and Certificate Authority (CA) signatures. Their closed architecture and limited scalability slowed the integration of new healthcare institutions, driving up operations and maintenance (O&M) costs.

Into this environment, Zhangdian district introduced Huawei DCS Data Center Solution for Small and Medium Hospital Consortiums, looking to tailor a unified digital system. Spanning underlying hardware, upper-layer applications, data integration, and resilience assurance, the solution addresses key challenges in primary healthcare development and turns on an easily accessible digital healthcare service network for residents.

Redefining Smart Healthcare with Stronger Medical Consortiums

What difference does this comprehensive healthcare service network make in people's daily lives? The experiences of patients, clinicians, and hospital administrators provide a clear perspective.

For Patients: No More Unnecessary Trips

As a frequent visitor to hospitals in Zhangdian, Ms. Zhao was all too familiar with the repeat examinations she had to undergo every time she switched hospitals. That frustration is now a thing of the past. Recently, after experiencing stomach discomfort, she first received imaging examinations at the Zhangdian District People's Hospital, then visited the Zhangdian District Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine for further consultation. With her medical records and imaging results all seamlessly shared between the two hospitals, she simply used her health insurance card to complete the consultation, prescription, and outpatient reimbursement process in a single, streamlined visit. With the new digital system in place, Ms. Zhao did not have to undergo repeat examinations, making her medical care faster, more convenient, and much less of a worry.

To support the transformation, the Zhangdian district medical consortiums built a unified data platform with the Huawei solution. All four public hospitals in the district have migrated to the new information system, enabling efficient access to EMRs, examination reports, and other clinical data across institutions. This further supports province-wide mutual recognition of laboratory and examination results as well as deeper clinical information sharing between medical consortiums, which allows residents to receive quicker and smoother healthcare services closer to home.

For Doctors: Making More Informed Decisions with Expertise and Digital Intelligence

"During consultations, system stability and data resilience are critical," noted Dr. Wang, who works in one of the consortiums. "Previously, long waits to retrieve medical records, review examination results, and issue prescriptions were common. And when the system slowed down, it created a stressful environment for both patients and clinicians. In addition, we were always concerned about potential data loss or system failures during emergencies, especially on night shifts."

The Huawei DCS full-stack data center solution delivers a flash-storage data center for Zhangdian to eliminate all reliability, resilience, and performance concerns, as well as implementing multilayer protection. The data center is built on Huawei-developed architecture and components, including central processing units (CPUs) and interface processors, to meet the medical consortiums' compliance requirements while enhancing the resilience of medical data storage and processing. This digital foundation supports core healthcare systems with a high-availability active-active architecture, achieving a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and a near-zero recovery time objective (RTO), to ensure 24/7 stable system operations. During peak hours, outpatient, inpatient, and consultation services across hospitals in the district continue to run smoothly. In addition to active-active storage, the solution strengthens the foundation for digital healthcare applications with ransomware protection. Medical records, examination reports, and personal information are all stored on a reliable platform, mitigating the risk of ransomware attacks and data breaches.

The unified digital diagnosis and treatment platform enables clinicians to access complete and reliable information more quickly, improving workflow efficiency and supporting more accurate decision-making.

For Administrators: Releasing Resources to Upgrade Healthcare Facilities and Develop Medical Talent

Over years of management, President Xia of a hospital within a Zhangdian medical consortium grappled with scattered systems, complex O&M, high costs, and low resource utilization, all of which stalled the hospital's high-quality growth.

To overcome these hurdles, the Huawei solution provides a full-stack management platform based on a dual-stack virtualization architecture and unified O&M capabilities. The platform supports multi-campus coordination, heterogeneous resource management, and intelligent O&M, enabling centralized scheduling and dynamic allocation of hardware and software resources across the medical consortium. As a result, hardware utilization has risen by over 30%, while O&M workloads have dropped by 40%. In the past, troubleshooting device failures often required multiple engineers to investigate separately, taking up far too much time. With end-to-end visualized management, technical teams can now demarcate and locate faults within minutes, accelerating issue resolution. The platform also streamlines the onboarding of new healthcare institutions into the medical consortium. By improving management efficiency and reducing operational workloads, it allows medical teams to leave O&M hassles behind and focus entirely on what they do best—patient diagnosis and treatment.

Looking ahead, the Zhangdian district medical consortiums plan to use the storage isolation zone enabled by the Huawei solution to establish a last line of defense for data protection. This will ensure that data can be restored in the event of a ransomware attack. Meanwhile, the medical consortiums aim to improve the local deployment efficiency of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, including AI-assisted EMR generation, EMR quality control, and clinical decision support systems (CDSS), with the ModelEngine toolchain, paving the way for broader AI adoption in the region's hospitals.

Building a New Model for Regional Medical Consortiums

From fragmented data silos to a fully interconnected digital healthcare network, the transformation of Zhangdian district medical consortiums demonstrates how Huawei DCS Data Center Solution for Small and Medium Hospital Consortiums has helped overcome industry challenges in data sharing, primary care strengthening, and data resilience. This has redefined digital healthcare and transformed service delivery, providing a replicable and scalable model for medical consortium development.