(Hong Kong, Shanghai, 19 April 2021) Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter “Ping An” or the “Group”, HKEX: 2318; SSE: 601318) is pleased to announce that AskBob Doctor, a consultation and treatment assistance tool, has ranked first in one of the three tasks in MEDIQA 2021, an artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare question-and-answer contest hosted by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). This achievement confirms Ping An’s world-leading research capability in natural language processing (NLP) in the healthcare industry, which is a key driver of Ping An’s healthcare ecosystem.

ACL is one of the most authoritative international academic institutions in the NLP field. The MEDIQA 2021 competition tests the performance of competitors’ algorithms on the automatic summarization of medical text with three tasks: consumer health question summarization, multi-answer summarization (MAS), and radiology report summarization. Ping An’s AskBob Doctor ranked first in the MAS task, tackling the challenges of combining and summarizing multiple answers to a medical question.

Doctors typically spend 10 to 15 hours a week on data query, collation and interpretation. Entering a medical question in a search engine may lead to multiple answers, which can be complementary or repetitive. The MAS technology automatically summarizes lengthy medical answers to convey the main idea of the original texts. The technology is integrated into Ping An’s AskBob Doctor to provide intelligent literature analysis and cutting-edge scientific research insights to help doctors make diagnoses and treatment decisions.

Ping An’s AskBob Doctor was launched in 2019 by the smart healthcare team of Ping An Smart City, which offers services for health departments, doctors, medical imaging and chronic disease research and treatment. It has served 37,000 medical institutions in mainland China and 740,000 doctors to date.

Ping An Group focuses on two domains of business, “pan financial assets” and “pan health care”. It applies innovative technologies to its ecosystems in healthcare, financial services, auto services and smart city services. The Group has been building its healthcare ecosystem over the past decade as a new engine for growth. The healthcare ecosystem includes medical regulators, patients, service providers, payers, and technologies to support the national “Healthy China” initiative.