Construction and Practice of Smart Wellness Model Integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine Health Preservation Industry Standards and Digital Systems

Abstract

The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) health preservation industry is expanding rapidly in China, while it is trapped in three major dilemmas: the absence of unified service standards, backward digital transformation, and disconnection between industrial standards and information technology. These problems lead to inconsistent service quality, low user adherence and hinder industrial large-scale development. Based on the interdisciplinary integration of TCM, health management and information science, this study constructed a closed-loop smart wellness model combining industrial standards, digital platforms and offline practice. Firstly, the three-round Delphi method was adopted to formulate the Industry Standards for TCM Health Preservation Services (HJ-ZYS-2024), which defined nine categories of mainstream wellness services and established a quantitative parameter system and quality evaluation framework (Chen Y, Zhang Q, Li M, et al., 2023; State Administration for Market Regulation of China, 2015). Secondly, an integrated digital wellness platform (DCP-TCM v1.0) tailored for TCM logic was developed, including five core modules: TCM constitution identification, personalized scheme generation, real-time monitoring, adherence management and intelligent optimization. Finally, a 12-month longitudinal quasi-experiment with four arms was conducted across five institutions (n=2000). The results showed that the integrated group achieved a health goal attainment rate of 76% and a dropout rate of 8%, with an average annual service cost of 1,800 RMB. All indicators were significantly superior to the other three groups, and a prominent synergistic effect between standards and digital systems was verified (synergy coefficient = 0.52, NNT = 2.4). This study firstly realized the deep integration of industrial standards and digital systems in the field of TCM health preservation, and formed a replicable and scalable smart wellness system. It provides empirical evidence and practical paradigms for the standardized and intelligent upgrading of China’s wellness industry.