Ant Group upgrades AI health assistant AQ with DeepSearch for clinical decision support

China’s Ant Group has updated the web version of its AI-native health assistant, AQ, launching DeepSearch for clinicians — a new feature designed to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The service is available free of charge to clinicians and medical students.

The AQ desktop platform offers two core functions — Health Q&A and DeepSearch — supporting medical literature search, clinical practice and research. It aims to reduce clinicians’ routine workload while improving access to high-quality, evidence-based medical information.

Sources are carefully curated according to recognised levels of evidence. The platform integrates over 36 million Chinese and international medical publications to provide clinical decision support aligned with real-world practice.

DeepSearch allows clinicians to quickly access the latest clinical guidelines across multiple specialties. Using AI to organise and synthesise research, it structures large volumes of information according to clinical needs, reducing the time required for retrieval and review.

In addition to literature search, DeepSearch supports evidence-based clinical decision support. For complex cases, treatment planning often involves extensive guideline consultation and literature review. DeepSearch aggregates relevant evidence, aligns it with global diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, and presents structured recommendations to support treatment planning.

The platform includes traceable citations, evidence-level filtering, and alignment with authoritative clinical guidelines, designed to reduce the workload for healthcare professionals.

Launched by Ant Group in June 2025, AQ (known in Chinese as Ant A-Fu) is an AI-native health service. For general users, AQ addresses common health concerns and supports healthy habits, particularly for needs that do not require a hospital visit.

The platform connects users to digital services from more than 5,000 hospitals nationwide and provides access to online consultations with 300,000 licensed physicians. AQ has also collaborated with over 1,000 physicians to create AI Doctor Agents, trained on each clinician’s expertise, which provide free answers to common health questions. In 2025, these agents collectively handled over 27 million inquiries.

As of January 2026, the AQ app has 30 million monthly active users and processes more than 10 million health-related queries daily, making it one of China’s leading AI-native health applications.