Progress in digital medicine

Chinese digital medicine society, a branch of Chinese medical association, was established and held its first academic annual meeting in Chongqing fromMay 21st to 23rd, 2011. In the following five years, five academic annual meetings have been held in Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Hangzhou, etc, with several publications of high-quality monographs like Digital Medicine Outline1 co-edited by Bo Zheng and Liang Minghui (People's Medical Publishing House, October 2009); Introduction to Digital Medicine1 co-edited by Zhang Shaoxiang, Tan Liwen, Li Lanjuan (Science Press, October 2015); Digital Orthopedics2 edited by Pei Guoxian and Zhang Yuanzhi (People's Medical Publishing House, June 2009), etc. Thanks to its unremitting effort, the journal Chinese Digital Medicine has published 11 vol since its foundation in 2005 and now establishes itself as one of the key journals among the scientific and technological periodicals for statistics in China and among Chinese technological journals. Over the last 5 years, digital medicine has experienced a rapid development, attracting much attention from Chinese government and academic community. Digital medicine research centers or institutes have been founded around the country where various research programs at national level have been conducted with fruitful findings obtained in digital hospital construction and digital human studies.1 After five years since the establishment of digital medicine society, several questions call for researchers' due attention: what's the global trend of digital medicine? What have we achieved in digital medicine research and its application in China? What problems exist? Based on experts' consensus, following are some suggestions: