WeDoctor and Tencent Forge Strategic Alliance to Advance Commercialization of Medical Large Language Models

In early 2024, 17 departments, including the National Data Administration, the National Health Commission, and the National Healthcare Security Administration, issued the Three-Year Action Plan for “Data Element ×” (2024–2026), which supports the development and training of large artificial intelligence models. During the Two Sessions, the 2024 Government Work Report proposed the “AI+” initiative for the first time. It is predictable thatIn the coming years, “AI+” will spark a wave of industrial upgrading in China, much like “Internet+,” which was proposed during the 2015 Two Sessions.

Encouragement policies for AI research and application are emerging one after another. The penetration of AI technologies, represented by large language models, across all industries has become an inevitable trend, with the healthcare sector regarded as the field boasting the broadest application scenarios and the greatest potential to achieve commercialization first.

According to a report by Global Market Insights, the global medical AI market is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 29%, reaching $70 billion by 2032. As reported by Frost & Sullivan, the market size of China’s medical artificial intelligence industry is expected to increase from RMB 6.8 billion in 2022 to RMB 311 billion in 2032, with a high CAGR of 46.6%.

The immense market potential has attracted tech companies to enter the fray.

Recently, an industry announcement has drawn widespread attention. WeDoctor and Tencent signed a strategic partnership agreement at Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen to jointly develop large-scale medical AI models and engage in comprehensive, in-depth collaboration on medical AI businesses.Both parties will integrate their respective accumulations and application scenarios in the field of artificial intelligence to create intelligent products for specific diseases, demonstrate cities for medical artificial intelligence applications, and more. They will also jointly build a unified digital-intelligence foundation to provide comprehensive joint solutions for the industry.

In recent years, WeDoctor has focused on promoting the continuous operation of its core business—the Digital Health Community—in Tianjin and Shandong, while expanding into Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Guiyang, and other provinces (cities); apart from routine business progress, WeDoctor has rarely made public statements. The strategic cooperation with Tencent has triggered high attention from the capital market and the industry—This collaboration reveals that WeDoctor is implementing a new strategic layout.After years of keeping a low profile, WeDoctor has announced a major partnership, clearly demonstrating that it came well-prepared.

According to public reports, this collaboration with Tencent marks a significant step for WeDoctor in deploying large medical models to upgrade its “Smart Hospital” and expand AI application scenarios in healthcare.

WeDoctor established China’s first internet hospital, the Wuzhen Internet Hospital, and subsequently pioneered innovative models such as the Internet Medical Consortium for Chronic Diseases and the Digital Health Community. Now, what new form does the “Smart Hospital” take?

As one of WeDoctor’s core business segments, the Digital Health Community is a health-oriented community built on a foundation of digital and intelligent technologies. It leverages mechanism innovation to center on health, use medical insurance payment as a lever, and drive performance through a health accountability system. The Health Community model aligns closely with the national government’s vigorous promotion of tightly integrated county-level medical communities, sharing the same underlying logic and fundamental objectives.

Previously, the Digital Health Community was established and operated with internet hospitals as the leading entities. To further address issues such as the lack of digital support and insufficient mechanism innovation in traditional medical communities, WeDoctor has continued to deepen the application of AI within its internet hospital framework.Since 2020, WeDoctor’s internet hospital has been progressively upgraded into a “Smart Hospital,” leveraging AI as its foundational driver to establish five major digital-intelligent diagnosis and treatment systems and operational capabilities encompassing “medical care, pharmaceuticals, testing, health management, and disease management.”, through a systematic product matrix of digital-intelligent medical consortia, comprehensively exploring the "pay-for-performance" reform, effectively promoting the quality improvement and efficiency enhancement of primary healthcare services.

Overall, WeDoctor has established a Digital Intelligence General Hospital within the Digital Health Community, building five core hubs: the Digital Intelligence Medical Center, Digital Intelligence Pharmaceutical Center, Digital Intelligence Cloud Laboratory Center, Digital Intelligence Health Management Center, and Digital Intelligence Regulatory Center. This initiative empowers primary healthcare systems with digital intelligence capabilities and achieves breakthroughs in reshaping service processes, delivery models, and management frameworks at the grassroots level.

This means that the “Smart Hospital” is a new, more intelligent form of internet hospitals, upgraded through AI capabilities, and represents the accumulation of WeDoctor’s low-profile efforts in recent years.

Meanwhile, both have been groundbreaking. Internet hospitals have opened up entirely new channels of communication among patients, doctors, and hospitals, evolving from initial industry exploration to gaining policy recognition and encouragement. To date, internet hospitals have become a standard component of medical institutions.Amid China’s push to promote “Internet + Healthcare,” internet hospitals have spearheaded the industry’s evolution.

As is well known, the key to building a new healthcare service system centered on health lies at the primary care level. AI is the indispensable tool for accelerating the upgrade of primary care capabilities and rapidly strengthening their capacity to deliver services.“Smart Hospitals” have opened up channels for the efficient and coordinated reform of healthcare delivery, pharmaceuticals, and health insurance, providing a mature and replicable intelligent implementation platform for key healthcare reform tasks such as tiered diagnosis and treatment and the development of close-knit county-level medical consortia.

In December 2023, the National Health Commission and nine other departments issued the “Guiding Opinions on Comprehensively Advancing the Development of Close-knit County-level Medical Consortia,” requiring that, by the end of June 2024, the development of close-knit county-level medical consortia be fully rolled out on a provincial basis.Clearly, smart hospitals will usher in a prime opportunity to showcase their capabilities.

Prior to the official announcement of its collaboration on large medical models, WeDoctor had already established extensive deployments in medical AI and achieved large-scale application of its AI products.

In 2017, WeDoctor donated RMB 100 million to jointly establish the Ruiyi Artificial Intelligence Research Center with Zhejiang University, collaboratively developing numerous AI application products.

Taking RealDoctor’s intelligent physician system as an example, the product leverages expert knowledge from tertiary-grade hospitals and dynamic data from integrated healthcare communities as training data sources. Built on core algorithms combining large language models with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), it has developed intelligent solutions such as AI-driven diagnosis and treatment systems for specific diseases, AI-assisted examinations, AI-based health management, intelligent prescription review, and digital-intelligent regulatory oversight, which are deeply integrated into digital integrated healthcare communities.

In recent years, as the core driver of the Digital Health Community, the platform has accumulated over 400 million dialogue records, more than 200 million medical cases, and clinical data from over 200,000 physicians. Centered on service scenarios encompassing prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and management, as well as regulatory scenarios involving healthcare services, pharmaceuticals, and health insurance, the platform has achieved in-depth learning and effective application of AI products.

WeDoctor’s medical AI technology has delivered significant quantitative and qualitative improvements in real-world clinical settings, demonstrating outstanding value. It is reported that the daily patient volume at WeDoctor Smart Hospitals exceeds 40,000 visits, with an AI-assisted diagnosis adoption rate by physicians surpassing 86%. AI-enabled health management applications support health managers in triage and patient guidance, increasing individual managerial efficiency by 150%. Following the implementation of AI-powered pharmaceutical services, labor costs for prescription review decreased by 31%, while the rationality and cost-effectiveness of medication use rose to over 98%. Digital-intelligence regulatory systems automatically conduct performance checks and scoring for physicians, provide real-time monitoring and analysis of medical insurance expenditures, and have improved medical and insurance compliance by 9.6%.

In short, WeDoctor’s medical AI capabilities and products follow a path of “originating from application scenarios and returning to them,” closely aligning with practical needs.

Furthermore, leveraging its robust disciplinary resources, WeDoctor Smart Hospital provides a solid impetus for the research, development, and application of medical AI products.

Currently, WeDoctor has engaged in in-depth collaboration with the Expert Committee on Digital-Intelligent Co-management of Major Chronic Diseases at the Primary Care Level and Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, focusing on the prevention and control of major chronic diseases at the primary care level and the “co-management of six diseases.” By pooling top-tier expert resources nationwide, the parties will jointly explore new breakthroughs in leveraging AI to achieve digital-intelligent co-management of chronic diseases at the primary care level.

Overall, WeDoctor’s “Smart Hospital” provides a fertile ground for the development of large medical models and serves as a ready-made model for their scaled implementation.

Since AI’s infiltration into the healthcare sector, its applications have gradually expanded across specialized subfields. Both conceptual advancements and product outcomes have been encouraging, while substantial untapped potential remains. In recent years, VCBeat has continuously prioritized tracking the development of medical AI.

Nevertheless, breakthroughs in technical capabilities, validation of value, and commercialization remain hurdles that all market entrants must overcome. In its “2023 Medical Artificial Intelligence Report,” VCBeat’s VBInsight noted that the commercial landscape for medical AI has always been shrouded in uncertainty.

For more advanced large medical models, the aforementioned challenges are even more pronounced. How does WeDoctor address them?

In terms of technology, as previously mentioned, WeDoctor’s medical AI technology is built upon massive datasets and diverse application scenarios, which constitutes its advantage in overcoming technical challenges related to deep learning for large medical models.

Following the collaboration with Tencent, WeDoctor’s medical AI capabilities will be further strengthened.

In 2023, Tencent released the Hunyuan large model, a practical-grade large language model independently developed across its entire technology stack. Featuring over 100 billion parameters and trained on more than 2 trillion tokens of pre-training data, it boasts robust Chinese content creation capabilities, logical reasoning in complex contexts, and reliable task execution. Soon thereafter, the Tencent Hunyuan large model was upgraded, officially opening its “text-to-image” functionality to the public. Following the upgrade, its overall performance in Chinese surpassed that of GPT-3.5, with coding capabilities improving by 20% to reach an industry-leading level.

Following the collaboration, joint refinement of the technical roadmap is a natural imperative. By developing disease-specific “agents” based on large language models, the partnership aims to enhance quality and efficiency across the industry, potentially unveiling application value data across more dimensions.

From VCBeat’s non-public sources, it has been learned that WeDoctor’s medical AI business has already generated tangible revenue. Taking the Tianjin Digital Health Community as an example, through an innovative pay-for-performance reform model, it has successfully achieved scaled revenue, with a single smart hospital reaching the revenue scale of a large Grade 3A hospital. Among these achievements, AI-enabled end-to-end empowerment has become the key engine for improving service delivery quality and efficiency, further driving a multi-fold increase in overall operational and managerial efficiency.

In reality, the barrier to entry for medical AI is extremely high. The research and development and training of large models entail substantial costs, requiring products to have broad application scenarios as well as definitive application value and revenue returns. While the industry is still struggling in the red ocean of online consultations and drug sales, WeDoctor has carved out a new track.

Pay-for-performance is a monumental, revolutionary initiative that has become a definitive direction for China’s national healthcare reform. Medical AI is enabling WeDoctor to generate scalable revenue from its pay-for-performance business model, laying a solid foundation for future monetization of large healthcare language models.

Building on existing business operations, WeDoctor and Tencent have established a clear path for collaboration, leveraging the WeDoctor platform and demonstration scenarios in Tianjin, Sanming, Shanghai, and other regions to conduct comprehensive, in-depth cooperation. This means that both parties will pool their financial resources, technological expertise, and distribution channels to jointly drive the implementation of applications. The two companies are developing large healthcare models based on practical application needs, which will not only achieve an internal closed loop of research, production, and utilization but also provide industry-grade general-purpose large model services across various fields of medical care, thereby realizing phenomenon-level medical AI applications akin to ChatGPT.

Therefore,The collaboration between WeDoctor and Tencent, characterized by complementary strengths and mutual empowerment, is highly likely to become a significant catalyst for helping medical AI overcome the hurdles of technological breakthroughs, value validation, and commercialization.

Currently, numerous tech and medtech companies are deploying large medical models, but the sector remains in its very early stages. Companies with superior technical capabilities and those that have been the first to validate their business models are better positioned to take the lead.

From ChatGPT in 2023 to Sora in 2024, and from OpenAI to tech giants worldwide, the explosive growth of large language models has accelerated the advent of the AGI era. Technological prowess and benchmark products have also driven a steady rise in the industry value of the corresponding companies. Taking OpenAI as an example, ChatGPT and Sora propelled its valuation from $29 billion to $80 billion within a single year.

Amid the AGI wave, medical AI—including large healthcare models—offers even greater potential. In light of its recent partnership with Tencent and the broader industrial landscape, what are the future prospects for WeDoctor?

First,Against the backdrop of China’s new healthcare reform, Weiyi’s AI-driven business model holds the potential for rapid replication and first-mover advantage in market capture.

In 2020 and 2023, due to its innovative model and remarkable operational effectiveness, the WeDoctor Tianjin Digital Health Community was twice listed among the “Top Ten New Initiatives” in China’s healthcare reform. Its experience and model were summarized by the competent authorities and promoted nationwide.

In February this year, WeDoctor partnered with Shanghai Ruijin Hospital to establish a Full-Lifecycle “Six-Disease Co-Management” Center in Sanming, pioneering the digital and intelligent management of six chronic diseases in China. As a flagship model for national healthcare reform, the Sanming Healthcare Reform 3.0, centered on people’s health, is currently being advanced, with digital and intelligent “Six-Disease Co-Management” serving as its core mechanism. In the future, a standardized digital medicine product system embodying “Ruijin Technology” and “Sanming Experience” will be rolled out to empower the development of close-knit medical consortia across China.

China boasts the world’s largest healthcare service system. The new healthcare reform is driving this system to shift from a “disease-centered” to a “health-centered” model, and from volume-based payment to value-based payment. This transition involves numerous complex key tasks and requires a long-term commitment. Currently, these critical initiatives are being advanced in a coordinated manner: tightly integrated county-level medical consortia are being rolled out nationwide, and the Sanming healthcare reform model is being promoted across China. WeDoctor’s Smart Hospital and Digital Health Community solutions are deeply engaged in this process, with established benchmark cases that can be rapidly replicated nationwide, thereby accelerating the industrialization of medical AI.

At the same time, WeDoctor has established barriers at both the technological and business model levels, making it a rare entity within the industry.

Its “Smart Hospital” initiative, after more than three years of practical implementation, has successfully driven the integration of technological capabilities, application scenarios, and commercial translation, achieving scaled monetization. In contrast to medical AI companies that still require continuous external funding, WeDoctor has achieved self-sustainability.

Leveraging the AI and clinical expertise of partners such as Tencent and Ruijin Hospital, WeDoctor is developing products aimed at creating disease-specific management “agents.” These agents align closely with the vision of highly human-like “agents” anticipated in the era of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), thereby presenting a significant opportunity to establish substantial technical barriers in the medical AI sector.

In the fiercely contested arena of large medical AI models, WeDoctor, accustomed to staying one step ahead, has not been absent this time. Leveraging its keen insight and years of accumulated expertise, it has quietly entered and advanced in this field. This strategic “first-mover” advantage, built upon years of layout—characterized by its accumulation of specialized disease data, diagnostic and treatment capabilities for specific conditions, and business scenarios achieving scalable revenue—will serve as the key engine driving its breakthrough performance growth in this new wave of “AI+”.