On the morning of December 2, the special lectures onDeveloping Agriculture and Empowering Rural Areas via Digital Businessof theLuojia SIM + E-commerce Forum, andthe events and activities of the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the E-commerce major, School of Information Management, Wuhan University were held as scheduled.

Yu Tong, Researcher at the School of Management, Zhejiang University, and winner of Outstanding Youth Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, was invited to give an academic report.

Yiwei Gong, Professor of the SIM, Wuhan University, presided over the event.

With the title ofDigital Technology and Accessibility of Rural and Urban Healthcare,Yu Tongshared her latest research achievementRural-urban healthcare access inequality challenge: transformative roles of information technologypublished inMIS Quarterly, a top-tier journal of information system.

Yu Tong's research has focused on the access inequality issues of rural-urban healthcare, starting from the application of smart healthcare, based on the theory of social transformation and the theory of technology availability, she refined the diverse mechanisms and evolution paths of healthcare information technology (HIT) to alleviate the rural-urban healthcare access inequality, and expounded the internal mechanism of healthcare information technology to alleviate the uneven distribution of healthcare resources between rural and urban areas.

Yu Tongpointed out that for a long time, the distribution of healthcare resources in China has always had regional inequality and rural-urban inequality. With the development of digital technology, a large number of cases of information technology helping rural healthcare are constantly emerging, and various healthcare information technology service platforms are also emerging, all of which are conducive to shortening the time and distance between rural and urban quality resources. The rural-urban healthcare access inequality is a complicated social challenge. In the existing research, information technology is regarded as an important means to narrow the rural-urban healthcare access inequality, but few researches can deeply explore its specific realization mechanism.

In view of the above issues,Yu Tongbelieved that the social transformation theory can explain the mechanism of HIT on the healthcare access inequalityfrom the microscopic level. As a social challenge, the rural-urban healthcare access inequality is rooted in the social structure, and administrators can respond to the challenge via various transformative interventions. This theory can be well applied to the ecosystem of healthcare industry, and depicts the internal relations among actors, various institutions and administrativeprocessin this system.

The study found that, in terms of solving the rural-urban healthcare access inequality, the effectiveness of HIT intervention depends on thefunctions that can be used by HIT at the social level. While thefunctions that can be used depends on the resources required by HIT system, the abilities shown by various actors using the system, and the recognized values in social governance.Yu Tongalso pointed out that in terms of alleviating the current social challenge, the effect of HIT interventions may change with the sharing availability, while collective availability is more likely to affect the adjustment of future HIT interventions.

In the discussion session, theparticipants had an in-depth exchange and discussion withYu Tongon issues such as topic selection, research strategies in rural scenes, and ways to achieve theoretical integration.The participants said that this academic report and interaction greatly increased academic cognition in the field of intelligent healthcare, enriched their knowledge in data technology promoting rural development, and gained a lot.

A series of special lectures onDeveloping Agriculture and Empowering Rural Areas via Digital Businesswere in the form of webinar, jointly organized by the School of Information Management, Wuhan University, and the journalData and Information Management. These lectures provide a platform for students majoring inE-commerce to know the professional frontier and the application scenarios of specialized knowledge.