Interview with Dr. Chen Jiarui: A Surgeon Decides to Rewrite the Underlying Rules of Global Healthcare - From a Personal Illness to an Institutional Experiment on Healthcare Sovereignty

After being turned down at the first clinic, Nora had referral documents, a well-organized medical history, and a clear understanding of her medical needs. The system failed her that afternoon.
A few hours later, a call back from the insurance company changed the outcome.
But one question remained unanswered in that phone call: Why does the system need a remedial call to function? Why are referral documents insufficient to open that door? Why, in her most vulnerable moments, does a patient need sufficient knowledge, willpower, and luck to be caught by a system that, in theory, should serve her?
These questions are the starting point for this report.
Because there was a doctor who, after becoming a patient, began to seriously try to answer them.

(Image caption) Dr. Gary Chen was changed by a personal experience—he became a patient himself. He vowed to rewrite the underlying rules of global healthcare.

I. Discovery of the Maze: When a doctor becomes a patient, Dr. Gary Chen's medical career is a typical path for surgical elites.
Born in Hefei, China, his medical training began at the Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, where he completed his early training in orthopedics and vascular surgery under the guidance of his mentor, Zhu Jiakai. After moving to the United States in 1993, he joined Harvard University as a foreign researcher and subsequently completed advanced studies in multiple specialties, including hand surgery, trauma, shoulder and elbow, and peripheral nerves. Since 2005, he has served as the chief of orthopedics at a large trauma hospital in downtown Los Angeles, where he has long handled complex trauma reconstruction, joint and nerve repair surgeries.
Judging solely from his career trajectory, he has almost reached the pinnacle of a surgeon: mature, stable, prestigious, and with a clear professional identity.
What changed him was not a paper or a technological breakthrough, but a personal experience that he described as "somewhat embarrassing."
He himself became a patient.
"Even as a doctor, finding the right specialist, retrieving the images, and going through the procedures still feels like navigating a maze."
This sentence carries a special weight when read after Nora's experiences. Nora didn't understand the inner workings of the system, so she wandered into a maze. Dr. Chen did, even after working in that system for twenty years, he was still wandering into a maze.
This suggests that the problem lies not in the patient's knowledge or abilities, but in the design of the maze itself.
Data is locked in different systems, medical records are not shared, and processes serve internal management rather than patient experience. There is no truly smooth common language between doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and patients. Often, patients are not defeated by the disease itself, but rather worn down by the friction within the systems.
Dr. Chen's experience with the disease allowed him to see the system he had long been involved in from the outside for the first time. What he saw was not a system that occasionally made mistakes, but a system that was structurally not centered on the patient.

II. The Decision to Leave the Operating Table
In 2015, Dr. Chen Jiarui made a choice rarely made in the career of a surgeon: to leave the highly mature clinical battlefield and devote himself to an institutional project with extremely high risk and very slow returns—founding AiTmed.
This was not an easy entrepreneurial decision. Over the next ten years, he invested approximately $140 million of his own money, almost entirely on his own, to build a system that aimed to change the underlying architecture of healthcare processes.
"If it were just about making a telemedicine app, things would be much easier," he said. "But that doesn't solve the fundamental problem."
This statement is worth pausing over. In the global healthcare technology market, there are already thousands of telemedicine apps. They solve some problems—making healthcare services more accessible to specific groups in specific scenarios. However, they almost all simply add a layer of convenience to the existing institutional framework without addressing the framework itself.
What Dr. Chen wanted to address was the framework itself.
He told GFM, "The biggest problem in healthcare today is not the lack of treatment capabilities, but the lack of a truly human-centered system that can be trusted, corrected, and coordinated."
This diagnosis closely matches the systemic flaws we observed in our previous two reports. Nora's language barrier, Dr. Chen's own difficulties in accessing medical data, and the gatekeeping logic of the referral mechanism—the common root of these problems lies in a systemic framework that was not designed to provide sufficient space for the actual needs of patients.

III. What does AiTmed attempt to solve? At the product level, AiTmed possesses several standard technology modules in the current medical technology market: 24-hour remote medical services, AI-powered intelligent physician matching, automated clinical documentation, blockchain-based evidence storage and data sharing, and secure communication and electronic referral.
The company's trial data shows that AI-assisted document processing can reduce administrative burden by approximately 70%, improve referral efficiency by over 50%, and shorten the average consultation matching time from 30 minutes to 5-10 minutes. These figures are currently internal trial data and have not yet been independently verified by a third party; readers should consider this context when making their evaluations.
But AiTmed's design ambitions go beyond these efficiency figures.
It attempts to answer a more fundamental question: Can a healthcare system rebuild trust and order among patients, doctors, and data without relying on a single hospital, a single insurance company, or a single platform monopoly?
The background to this issue is the industry reality we analyzed in Part Six: insurance capital intervenes in medical decisions through pre-authorization, tech giants accumulate patient data through health platforms, and pharmaceutical companies control drug accessibility through pricing mechanisms. In this landscape, patients' actual decision-making space is being systematically shrunk.
AiTmed's design intent is to give patients back actual control over their medical pathways and medical records. The purpose of blockchain-based evidence storage is not merely technological security, but to ensure that control over the data clearly belongs to the patient, not the platform or institution.
This intention directly aligns with the issue of medical data sovereignty that we discussed in Part Four.

IV. Institutional engineering requires more than just technology.
Huang Linjing, an IT expert who joined AiTmed in 2025, made a statement that accurately pointed out the core of the medical data problem:
"The problem in healthcare is not just data security, but more importantly, how data is accessed, authorized, and understood, rather than being locked up in one place forever."

(Image caption) Mr. Huang Linjing, an IT expert who joined AiTmed in 2025, said: "The problem in healthcare is not just data security, but more importantly, how data is accessed, authorized, and understood, rather than being locked in one place forever."

This statement describes a technological version of the predicament Nora encountered at her first clinic: her medical history existed, but it couldn't be accessed at that moment. The information existed, but the access path was blocked.
Linjing Huang previously founded the blockchain auditing platform Bigle, which was sold to a large financial institution in 2024. He also participated in deploying processes and front-end systems for over 300 US hospitals. At AiTmed, his core responsibility is to ensure the legal, secure, and sustainable flow of medical data across different systems, jurisdictions, and payment methods.
The complexity of this problem far exceeds that of typical technology development. It requires simultaneously addressing compliance requirements of the U.S. HIPAA, differences in interstate laws, legal jurisdiction issues in cross-border healthcare, and data interface standards between different institutions.
AiTmed has extended this concept to include "medical stablecoins," attempting to resolve the multi-currency payment friction issues in cross-border medical services. This is a truly cutting-edge institutional vision, but its feasibility still needs to be verified in actual operation.

V. The Global South Experiment: Where are institutional interfaces most needed?
The early implementation of AiTmed had a noteworthy geographical characteristic: it first expanded to the regions with the most urgent institutional needs and the most obvious resource misallocation, rather than starting with the most mature healthcare markets.
The platform has already partnered with the Philippine government and medical education system and has received practical application certification from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense, enabling local military personnel to connect with US physicians in real time.
The choice is logically clear from an institutional perspective. The Philippines has a large pool of American-trained healthcare professionals, but lacks adequate integration of its domestic healthcare system. Kuwait has some areas with the capacity to pay, but faces challenges such as insufficient specialist care and difficulties connecting cross-border medical resources.
AiTmed aims to act as a connecting layer between these systems—not to replace existing systems, but to establish reliable channels between the interfaces of existing systems.
In the seventh installment of our global perspective series, we mentioned that the second season would delve into the issue of healthcare finance sovereignty in the Global South. AiTmed's early deployments in the Philippines and the Middle East may serve as a concrete example of this larger issue.

VI. Irvine Medical Examination Center: A Verifiable Local Sample. For GFM, the most noteworthy aspect of AiTmed is not just its expansion potential in the global market, but its ability to establish a verifiable and comparable institutional sample locally.
The first point of contact for this sample was the Irvine Medical Examination Center.
This center primarily serves the Chinese community, integrating physical examinations, remote consultations, data retrieval, and specialist referrals. It attempts to systematically address the most common yet long-neglected problems faced by new Chinese immigrants in the U.S. healthcare system: language barriers, unfamiliarity with the system, chaotic referrals, difficulty accessing medical records, and a lack of support within an unfamiliar system.
This list of problems highly overlaps with Nora's experience described in the first article.
"Many people don't refuse to see a doctor, but they don't know how to access the system or how to avoid getting stuck in it," Dr. Chen said.
This statement accurately describes the most common form of failure of healthcare sovereignty at the individual level: it's not that the system doesn't exist, but that patients cannot access it, or that they cannot be effectively served within it.
The true significance of the Irvine Center is that it provides a local experiment that can be observed, recorded, and compared: when a so-called patient-centered healthcare architecture is actually operating at the community level, what problems can it solve, and what problems does it still fall short of?
GFM will continue to monitor the actual operation of this center as a long-term observation sample for the "Healthcare Sovereignty" series.

VII. An Honest Question: Where are the Boundaries of Institutional Experimentation? At the end of the interview, GFM asked Dr. Chen Jiarui how he would most like AiTmed to be defined if it were to be remembered by the outside world in the future.
After a moment of silence, he said:
"If it ends up being remembered only as a medical technology company, that would be a failure. I hope it can prove one thing: healthcare can be redesigned."
We've quoted this sentence more than once throughout the series because it accurately describes the core reason for the existence of the "Healthcare Sovereignty" column.
But as a media outlet that takes systemic issues seriously, we also need to honestly raise a question:
AiTmed's claimed data—a 70% reduction in administrative burden and a 50% increase in referral efficiency—is currently internal trial data and has not been independently verified. The legal validity of blockchain-based HIPAA records, and their complete applicability under the current US regulatory framework, also requires further verification through more real-world cases.
An institutional experiment is worth documenting not because it has succeeded, but because it attempts to solve real problems and is willing to allow its results to be observed and verified.
Dr. Chen's awareness of the problems is clear. The systemic flaws he identified are real. The resources he invested are substantial. All of these deserve serious consideration.
However, the distance between realizing a problem and implementing a system is always more difficult to bridge than any technical architecture diagram. That distance requires time, the accumulation of data in actual operation, and continuous external observation and critical discussion.
This is also why GFM chose to continue following this story.

Next article: Who owns your medical records? Global Medical Data Sovereignty Map

This article is based on an in-depth interview with Dr. Chen Jiarui conducted by GFM, as well as publicly available product information and trial data from AiTmed. The efficiency data cited in this article are from AiTmed's internal trial reports and have not been independently verified by a third party. GFM will continue to monitor the actual operations of AiTmed and the Irvine Medical Examination Center as a long-term focus of its "Healthcare Sovereignty" series.