Digital Intelligence–Enabled Proactive Health: An Integrated Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Proactive health is a health-action paradigm rooted in the traditional Chinese wisdom of “preventive treatment of disease” and contemporary Healthy China practices. It emphasizes anticipating future health risks through promoting individual participation, sustained action, professional support, and system-wide coordination throughout the life course. Conventional practices, however, are constrained by delayed risk identification, difficulty in interpreting health information, weak maintenance of health behaviors, fragmented service provision, and the strong treatment orientation of health systems. These limitations hinder the sustained translation of preventive principles into everyday practice and institutional capacity. Digital-intelligent technologies expand the practical conditions for implementing proactive health through continuous sensing and health representation, risk assessment and knowledge interpretation, personalized generation and collaborative decision-making, and feedback-based learning and dynamic adaptation. Building on this capability set, this article proposes the I-ADE analytical framework for digital intelligence–enabled proactive health. Intelligent Enablement (I) forms the shared technological foundation. Agency Activation (A) facilitates the formation and pursuit of proactive goals by strengthening individuals’ sense that they “can do,” have “reason to” act, and are “energized to” act. Delivery Transformation (D) is reflected in improvements in the anticipatory, precise, timely, continuous, and coordinated nature of health services. Ecosystem Evolution (E) fosters coordinated adjustments in health-system components, including governance, the health workforce, health information, health technologies, financing, and service delivery. The framework integrates individual action, professional services, and the health system into a unified analytical structure; distinguishes proactive health, digital-intelligent conditions, and empowerment outcomes; and identifies long-term individual health capabilities, autonomous control, upstream risk management, service improvement, health equity, and health-system sustainability as principal criteria for evaluating digital-intelligent empowerment.

Keywords

proactive health / digital-intelligent empowerment / digital health / individual agency / human–AI collaboration / I-ADE framework

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The Author(s). Published by Higher Education Press.

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