The Tai'an municipal government signed a strategic cooperation agreement with online health care services company WeDoctor on Sept 5 to jointly build an integrated healthcare center.

A new online hospital for the city for chronic diseases was also unveiled.

WeDoctor -- based in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province -- is a unicorn company offering online healthcare services. These allow patients to conduct video chats with doctors and make appointments and submit prescription requests online.

The company has built a digital medical network connected to over 2,700 hospitals and 290,000 doctors and has served an estimated 190 million patients.

The integrated healthcare center in Tai'an will build an online hospital through big data, artificial intelligence and other digital technologies, officials said.

This will provide more insight into and improve the transparency of medical services, and boost the digital healthcare market -- in a bid to transform the connection between doctors and patients, while making remote diagnoses as well as intelligent diagnoses and treatment possible.

The online hospital for chronic diseases, which was listed among the first batch of national pilot projects, has connected with the city's 23 outpatient pharmacies for chronic diseases.

It provides a one-stop service for online consultations, prescriptions, drug purchases, medical insurance payments and door-to-door drug delivery for over 200,000 patients with chronic diseases in the city.