Alipay's Parent Company Ant Group Fully Acquires Haodf Online

Recently, data from Qichacha shows that Hu Dong Feng Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., the operating entity of the internet healthcare platform Haodf Online, has undergone industrial and commercial changes: its shareholder has been changed to Shanghai Yunyu Enterprise Management Consulting Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Ant Group, which now holds a 100% stake; former shareholders including Haodf Online founder Wang Hang and Lei Jun have exited, although Wang Hang remains as the company’s chairman; the legal representative has been changed to Zhang Junjie, Vice President of Alipay and General Manager of the Digital Medical Health Business Unit.

Latest Business Registration Information for Haodf Online, Image Source: Qichacha

As one of the pioneers of internet-based medical services, every move by Haodf Online has drawn significant attention from industry practitioners. Particularly over the past year or so, following successive reports of layoffs, investor exits, and efforts to seek mergers and acquisitions, speculation about new investors for Haodf Online has continued to emerge.

This change in business registration information marks the first appearance of definitive public information. To date, although neither Haodf Online nor Alipay has proactively issued public statements, the long-standing speculation has finally come to a temporary halt.

In the field of internet healthcare, Haodf Online has been navigating the industry for 18 years. It pioneered the Yinchuan Smart Internet Hospital, facilitating pilot initiatives in Yinchuan and laying a solid foundation for the subsequent implementation of national policies. The numerous accolades it has received have been extensively documented by VCBeat and other media outlets, so they will not be reiterated here.

What Has Haodaifu Online Become Today?

A review of the Haodf Online APP reveals that Ant Group’s equity investment has not had a direct impact on the suite of services offered on the platform.

Online consultation is the core service of Haodf Online. A review of active physicians’ pages on the app reveals that doctor–patient interactions and patient reviews are dated very recently, indicating that the online consultation business remains in continuous operation.

To diversify the modes of communication between doctors and patients, Haodf Online launched live-streamed free clinic consultations several years ago. Unlike offline free clinics, which require dedicated personnel to organize, coordinate schedules, and secure venues, live-streamed sessions are initiated independently by physicians and viewed by patients upon appointment, with minimal operational intervention. As can be seen, the live-streamed free clinic section on the Haodf Online app features a full schedule of upcoming consultations for the week as well as recorded replays.

Whether through online consultations or live-streamed free clinics, the central figures are the physicians registered on the platform, who are therefore minimally affected by changes in shareholding. Over the past 18 years, Haodf Online has undertaken extensive initiatives centered around physicians.

Since 2008, Haodf Online has been developing its Physician Workstation to provide online doctor-patient communication tools. In 2016, the Yinchuan Smart Internet Hospital was launched, enabling registered physicians on the Haodf platform to provide online diagnosis and treatment services after completing multi-site practice registration.

Since then, Haodf Online has successively established a team-based physician consultation model and built an intelligent triage system, medical record management system, cloud note-taking system, medical supplies catalog, and supply chain management system, consistently iterating its tools to support physicians’ online consultations and case discussions.

By continuously updating and iterating its physician tools and upgrading its physician incentive mechanisms, Haodf Online has earned a strong reputation among doctors, making its physician network a core asset.

In recent years, as the number of public internet hospitals has increased, the growth in the number of physicians on major online healthcare platforms has slowed. However, data released annually by Haodf.com shows that its physician base continues to grow steadily from an already large foundation.

Year-on-Year Changes in the Number of Doctors on Haodf.com; Source: Public Data from the Platform

Prior to 2020, the number of physicians on Haodf Online had already exceeded 200,000, and it has continued to grow despite intensifying competition among major platforms for physician resources. According to Haodf Online’s official website, as of yesterday, the platform had listed 932,951 physicians from 10,530 accredited hospitals across China, with 283,306 doctors from public hospitals providing online consultations.

Overall,Today’s Haodf Online has essentially evolved into a “light-operation” platform that holds strong appeal for physicians, offering ample tools and procedural support after onboarding, and facilitating peer-to-peer assistance among doctors.

Now let's turn to Alipay.

At the “2024 Inclusion·Bund Summit” held on September 5, 2024, Alipay officially launched its new product, “AI Health Manager,” offering users more than 30 AI-powered health services, including finding doctors, interpreting medical reports, accompanying patients during consultations, answering health insurance inquiries, and managing personal health.

On the day of the conference, Alipay also announced the opening of its medical AI agent collaboration framework to the healthcare and broader health industries, aiming to co-build an AI-driven health service ecosystem. To reduce development and operational costs for institutions, Alipay launched a professional collaboration platform for healthcare AI agents, offering free access to large healthcare language models along with supporting computing power and data security solutions. Currently, more than 20 professional medical institutions, specialties, and physician-led AI agents have joined the “AI Health Assistant” platform.

VCBeat learned at the “2024 Inclusion·Bund Summit” that Haodf Online is already a partner in the open ecosystem of the “AI Health Manager.” Wang Hang, founder of Haodf Online, attended the new product launch event on the day as a guest representing its partners.

Compared with previous major AI-powered healthcare service products, the “AI Health Steward” is significantly different. It extensively integrates the vast service resources connected through Alipay, rather than offering AI services from a single medical institution. Furthermore, it provides end-to-end services covering the entire patient journey—including online appointment registration, offline in-person consultation accompaniment, and post-consultation medical insurance reimbursement—instead of addressing only isolated segments.

“AI Health Manager” is positioned as “Q&A as a Service” and has become the unified entry point for all of Alipay’s consumer-facing healthcare services.

Taking online medical consultation as an example, when users input disease descriptions, target departments, or related service requirements into the “AI Health Assistant,” the system can recommend physicians from Alipay’s network of 900,000 doctors and push consultation or appointment registration services to patients. The online consultation page of Alipay’s Medical Health Channel also shows that doctors tagged with “Haodf Online” appear in the physician list.

Attempting to initiate a medical consultation reveals that,Whether searching for doctors via the online consultation page or using the “AI Health Assistant,” users can find physicians on Haodf Online and proceed to consult them through the Haodf Online mini-program on Alipay.

In short,At the business level, Alipay has integrated Haodf Online into its collaborative ecosystem, making the platform’s 280,000 doctors part of Alipay’s medical resources.

However, as the Alipay Healthcare AI Agent collaborative ecosystem is also open to the industry, existing partners include not only Haodf Online but also the Zhejiang Provincial Health Commission, Shanghai Renji Hospital, and the Hangzhou Healthcare Security Administration. Furthermore, Alipay’s online consultation services have integrated physician resources from multiple internet healthcare platforms, including AliHealth, Xiaolu Traditional Chinese Medicine, and WeDoctor. Therefore,From the perspectives of online consultation entry points and medical AI agent collaboration, it is not yet apparent how deeply Haodf Online has integrated into Alipay.

Since launching its first online appointment registration service in 2014, Alipay has been strategically positioned in the healthcare industry for a decade. Over this period, it has primarily focused on driving the digitalization of offline services, with an emphasis on enhancing connectivity and improving efficiency.

Alipay has long been deeply engaged in the healthcare and medical insurance sectors, extensively connecting resources for healthcare and medical insurance services.

In the medical insurance sector, Alipay provides end-to-end support for the digital supervision of medical insurance funds and mobile payments, accumulating over 600 million insured users and a comprehensive, rapidly updated knowledge base of medical insurance policies. In the healthcare sector, Alipay is accelerating the digital transformation of medical institutions; to date, more than 3,600 hospitals across over 300 cities in China are delivering digital healthcare services to patients via the Alipay platform.

Alipay also promotes the integration of medical insurance and healthcare services around user needs. Currently, Alipay’s Medical Health channel aggregates over 100 categories and more than 20,000 specific services officially provided by medical insurance authorities, health commissions, and hospitals.

The recently launched “AI Health Assistant” deeply integrates the technical capabilities and service resources accumulated by Alipay over the past decade, representing a flagship achievement in Alipay’s healthcare initiatives.

VCBeat learned from the “2024 Inclusion·Bund Summit” that,Over the next decade, Alipay aims to apply AI toward solving productivity challenges.This plan can be understood as aiming to drive the generation of “incremental supply” on the supply side.

For example, the “AI Health Steward” offers specialized AI agents tailored to medical specialties and individual physicians. Zhang Tao, Chief Physician at Peking University People’s Hospital, was the first doctor to launch an AI assistant agent on Alipay, while the Department of Urology at Shanghai Renji Hospital has deployed a specialty-specific AI agent.

Specialty and Physician AI Agents on the Alipay AI Health Assistant Platform

Specialty and Physician AI Agents are designed to provide AI tools tailored to specialty development or physicians’ practice needs, even creating “digital twins” of doctors to amplify the service efficiency of renowned experts or help grassroots healthcare providers improve their diagnostic and treatment capabilities.

Haodf.com boasts a vast pool of renowned medical experts. Over the past decade, the platform and its physicians have leveraged the internet to channel high-quality healthcare resources from major cities to grassroots levels and remote areas, thereby saving patients time and travel costs. However, given the limited availability of premium medical resources, even though the internet enhances the efficiency of doctor-patient communication, it remains challenging to scale up supply significantly.

So,With Ant Group holding 100% ownership of Haodf Online, will Alipay leverage its resources of renowned physicians to accelerate the development of physician AI agents, thereby advancing its long-term strategy of “addressing productivity issues” for the next decade? This is worth watching.

After all, high-quality physicians and services are goals that major platforms strive to achieve. For Alipay, as its medical AI agent collaboration ecosystem aggregates more high-quality healthcare service providers and the “AI Health Manager” enables a broader range of service functionalities, the platform can leverage this unified major entry point to develop more diversified commercialization pathways.