Baidu Health, a medical subsidiary of Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc, has announced it will build an artificial intelligence-powered patient-doctor matching engine to address a major healthcare issue - finding the right doctor.

The company said it also will upgrade its popular healthcare science platform Baidu Medical Encyclopedia, sharing authoritative popular science knowledge with its partners for free.

Baidu Executive Vice-President Shen Dou said Baidu aims to capitalize on AI and work with leading medical experts, doctors and scholars to better cater to patients' needs, playing a key role in diagnosis, drug use, healthcare, mental health consultation and other aspects.

Yang Minglu, general manager of Baidu Health, said Baidu Health will use AI technology to analyze and identify users' needs and work with public hospitals and doctors to establish a public hospital doctor information library to help patients to find the right doctor match.

Looking ahead, Yang said Baidu Health will continue to partner with the public medical system to provide doctors, hospitals and patients accurate and efficient services for the long run.

Currently, Baidu Health has built a complete service chain ranging from science popularization and consultation to chronic disease management, reporting an average daily search volume for content of 200 million and more than 100 million daily users.

So far, Baidu Health has included 500 million items of authoritative popular science content, attracting more than 300,000 professional doctors to provide over 2 million online medical services per day.