From Online to Omni-domain, from Digital Therapeutics to Brain Science: How JD Health Achieves Its New Strategic Goals

On the afternoon of February 10, 2023, the Grand Ballroom of Beijing Kerry Centre Hotel was packed with business professionals dressed in formal or “semi-formal” attire. All seats were taken long before the event began, with many attendees standing along both sides and the rear of the venue. As the hall reached its standing capacity, a considerable number of people gathered outside as well. While the outdoor temperature was approximately 5°C, the indoor heat from the heating system combined with body warmth made the venue not just warm, but quite hot.

This is the scene of the 3rd JD Health Partner Conference. As one of the special sessions of the Partner Conference, the Annual Doctor Gala was also held for the first time on February 11.

Mirroring the dense crowds at the venue, JD Health released a barrage of information during the conference, showcasing how it has become the “primary entry point for online health consumption” and outlining its strategic roadmap to achieve the goal of becoming the “leading entry point for nationwide, omnichannel health consumption.”

JD Health's 3rd Partner Conference

At the conference, JD Health reviewed a range of operational and performance metrics exhibiting rapid growth; among these, annual online consultation volume via its internet hospital, the number of patients served by JD Pharmacy, and the scale of medical device users each surpassed 100 million.

As of now, JD Health Internet Hospital has nearly 50,000 associate chief physicians and above, established 27 first-level clinical departments and 151 second-level clinical departments, with external doctors covering more than 15,000 offline hospitals.

In the first half of 2022, JD Health’s online hospital averaged 250,000 consultations per day; in December 2022, during the peak of COVID-19 infections, daily consultations reached a high of 1.14 million, with annual consultations exceeding 100 million.

As the largest pharmaceutical retail channel across both online and offline platforms, JD Pharmacy recorded a growth rate exceeding four times the industry average for the seventh consecutive year in 2022. Currently, JD Pharmacy has served over 100 million patients, with the Days of Therapy (DOT) for chronic disease patients increasing by 37% quarter-over-quarter, thereby effectively improving treatment outcomes.

In 2022, JD Health’s user base for medical devices surpassed 100 million, making it the primary online channel for sales growth for numerous medical device brands. In the field of nutritional and health supplements, JD Health collaborated with brand partners to advance the “Precision Nutrition Leadership Initiative,” resulting in a 92% year-on-year increase in transaction volume from brand members.

Yaojingcai continues to serve as a “digital bridge,” launching an omnichannel agency business that extends the value of the retail supply chain and has already generated incremental growth for nearly 100 industrial enterprises.

Overall, JD Health has established the industry’s most comprehensive supply capability for pharmaceutical and healthcare products, the most efficient omnichannel distribution capability, and marketing capabilities covering the entire product lifecycle. Over the past three years, JD Health’s revenue has maintained a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 68%, while its annual active individual users and daily consultation volume have achieved CAGRs of 48% and 213%, respectively.

Rapid data growth sends a positive signal. “Over the past two years, in the process of serving users together with our partners, JD Health has become the ‘primary online gateway for health consumption.’” At the conference, Jin Enlin, CEO of JD Health, announced that the company’s future goal is to build the “primary nationwide and omni-channel gateway for health consumption.”

How to Advance Toward Becoming the “Primary Entry Point for Omnichannel Health Consumption”? The Key Lies in the Term “Omnichannel”The term “omnichannel” carries multidimensional implications, encompassing both online and offline integration, as well as coverage within and beyond the JD ecosystem. Based on information released at the recent Partner Conference, several key points can be identified.

Online resource development and operation are the strengths of JD Health, and have achieved remarkable results. In other dimensions, JD Health is also continuously expanding and integrating.

Building on its standard online consultation services, JD Health has established 27 specialized centers to deliver refined operations and provide patients with end-to-end services encompassing disease screening, treatment, and rehabilitation. In this process, through collaborations with hospitals and medical experts, the company enables seamless two-way referrals between online and offline care settings when necessary.

Meanwhile, JD Health is expanding its serious medical services into diversified health consultations. Over the past two years, the pool of professionals providing health consultation services on JD Health has grown from solely physicians to now include 22 categories of specialized service providers, such as pharmacists, nutritionists, psychological counselors, and rehabilitation therapists. The platform offers more than 500 types of medical and health consultations, better meeting the diverse consumer demands of users.

Previously, JD Health offered these integrated services to individuals through products such as JD Family Doctor. In 2022, JD Health extended its integrated services to corporate clients, encompassing two major product lines—health management and medical consultation and treatment—to deliver customized, digital-intelligent employee health solutions that cover both online and offline scenarios.

In the future, JD Health will continue to adopt the specialty center model to enhance its specialized service capabilities; it will expand the supply of physicians and non-clinical professionals, providing users with “solution-based” services rather than single, one-off interactions.

JD Health provides various types of integrated services based on patients' diverse needs.

Currently, JD Health has established a comprehensive internet hospital integrating medical care, education, and research. The integration of “medical care, education, and research” was traditionally seen primarily in physical hospitals, especially large public hospitals; for JD Health, this is by no means a mere formal slogan, but rather a set of concrete, implemented actions.

In the healthcare sector, JD Health provides physicians with a diverse array of online diagnosis and treatment tools, including clinical decision support systems, intelligent triage, and physician team collaboration platforms, helping them expand their service reach and effectively acquire targeted patients. “A dermatologist practicing on the JD Health Internet Hospital has cumulatively served over 100,000 patients, and there are many more such physicians,” said Hu Yanan, General Manager of the Internet Healthcare Division at JD Health.

To enable physicians to manage patients effectively, JD Health has developed an out-of-hospital management system. Leveraging this system, physicians can provide continuous, integrated online and offline patient management and interventions. Furthermore, JD Health has collaborated with authoritative experts to customize 350 disease-specific health plans, 1,000 follow-up knowledge bases, and more than 10 types of patient benefits, thereby enhancing management efficiency and improving patient adherence.

JD Health also creates various opportunities for professional development for physicians. For example, it offers content such as academic paper publications, academic live streams, continuing medical education (CME), and online practice skill enhancement, while enabling the accumulation of digital case records to meet physicians’ professional growth needs. Notably, its Medical Training Center connects with national-level remote continuing medical education courses, introducing more than 70 CME programs covering multiple disciplines including internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, and pediatrics. In 2022, JD Health hosted over 150 academic live-streaming events for physicians, disseminating the latest academic achievements.

Balancing scientific research with demanding clinical duties has long been a major pain point for many physicians. In practice, research projects face challenges such as high costs, uncontrollable patient loss to follow-up, and lack of out-of-hospital data. In response, JD Health has launched its Real-World Data (RWD) Research Platform, offering basic functionalities free of charge to physicians.

JD Health’s RWD Scientific Research Platform efficiently governs in-hospital data while integrating out-of-hospital follow-up data, thereby reducing costs for researchers. By leveraging a comprehensive suite of follow-up products and patient incentive systems, the platform enhances follow-up efficiency and patient adherence, enabling studies to obtain more multidimensionally complete data.

To explore the application of cutting-edge technologies, Li Xin, Vice President of JD Group and General Manager of the Technology and Product Department at JD Health, announced the establishment of the JD Health Exploration Research Institute during this Partners Conference. The institute comprises three laboratories focused on Brain Cognitive Science, Intelligent Health Devices, and Digital Therapeutics. It will conduct research in frontier areas such as brain and neurological disorders, intelligent health monitoring devices, and digital therapeutics, driving technological innovation and clinical translation.

JD Health Establishes JDH XLab

In the future, JD Health will increase its investment in technological innovation in areas such as disease screening technologies, diagnostic technologies that simulate expert capabilities, and digital therapeutics. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies, it will support scenarios including remote consultation, treatment of critical illnesses, disease management, and medical research, thereby providing services for physicians’ clinical practice and scientific research.

It is evident that, in addition to healthcare services, JD Health has made substantial investments in the “behind-the-scenes” areas of education and research, and will continue to strengthen its efforts in these domains.

Pharmaceuticals (including medical devices and consumables) are an indispensable component of healthcare services. JD Health has established significant barriers to entry in the medical supply chain and integrates multiple retail models to achieve complementary advantages.

JD Health has established a comprehensive pharmaceutical warehousing network across China, providing supply chain services that cover all temperature zones and dosage forms. This infrastructure enables same-day delivery for its self-operated B2C pharmaceutical orders in 146 cities and next-day delivery in 337 cities. Its DTP (Direct-to-Patient) pharmacy stores have expanded to 26 provinces and municipalities nationwide, offering more than 400 specialized drug varieties. In the O2O sector, JD Health meets full-scenario needs characterized by “nighttime, urgency, and privacy,” with delivery speeds as fast as 28 minutes.

JD Pharmacy DTP Pharmacy

Going forward, JD Health will continue to deepen the value of launching newly approved innovative drugs exclusively across its online platforms in China, accelerate access to special categories such as rare disease medications and foods for special medical purposes (FSMP), and reach more patients in need through a series of initiatives including innovative payment solutions, charitable assistance programs, and integration with national medical insurance. Leveraging Direct-to-Patient (DTP) pharmacies, JD Health will further promote the online-offline integration of its service models, continuously enhancing its professional service capabilities across all channels and product categories.

In terms of medical devices, JD Health will prioritize and make breakthroughs in eight key categories, including home monitoring, respiratory oxygen therapy, physical therapy, rehabilitation, and medical aesthetics and skincare. Leveraging JD Health’s big data and consumer insights, the company will co-incubate exclusive, customized products with its partners. Additionally, JD Health will onboard a more diverse range of merchants—including individual stores, enterprise stores, offline stores, and source-direct stores—to meet users’ one-stop shopping needs.

Broader category coverage and deeper, specialized operations require strong support from partner brands and merchants. Therefore, at its Partner Conference, JD Health announced that it would continuously optimize the user experience, uphold fairness in platform rules, and improve the rights and tools available for merchant growth. By providing tiered, high-quality supply and a competitively priced platform experience, JD Health aims to meet users’ increasingly refined health consumption needs.

JD Health’s initial and primary source of traffic is JD.com. With nearly 600 million annual active users on JD.com, JD Health’s internet hospital has already handled over 100 million consultations annually, and its pharmaceutical retail services have served more than 100 million patients. These figures clearly demonstrate the massive scale of its user base. However, JD Health is not content to rest on these achievements; its “omni-channel” strategy aims to expand its traffic pool from within the JD ecosystem to outside it.

In the future, JD Health will achieve comprehensive coverage of out-of-hospital traffic by leveraging consumer insights to deliver precisely targeted content across online platforms and offline media, thereby driving user acquisition. Meanwhile, it will operate private-domain traffic for partner pharmaceutical and medical device brands, continuously assisting them in patient management and improving patients’ Days on Therapy (DOT).

For example, JD Health has partnered with short-video platforms on new media initiatives and collaborated closely with Beijing Television on the program *I Am a Great Doctor*, leveraging a “celebrity + renowned physician” format to deliver science communication content that is both professional and engaging. These efforts serve as effective channels for JD Health and its partner brands to acquire new users.

In the future, JD Health will continue to leverage digitalization to streamline user journey pathways, achieve omnichannel marketing, and employ digital intelligence solutions to help partners drive incremental channel growth, offering new perspectives for marketing upgrades.

These initiatives, which contribute to the achievement of strategic goals, include both horizontal expansion and vertical deepening of existing businesses, as well as entirely new endeavors such as the establishment of the Research Institute. Regardless of their nature, all these initiatives remain centered around the two core business segments: healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

As one of the first major industry conferences held after the Spring Festival, JD Health’s Partner Conference attracted widespread attention from partner brands and physicians, creating a vibrant atmosphere on site. The implementation of various initiatives announced at the conference will also have direct significance for the development of the industry.

2022 marked the beginning of high-quality development for internet hospitals, a trend underscored by both policy directives and initiatives undertaken by major enterprises.

In recent years, internet hospitals have continued to expand in scale across dimensions such as quantity and service volume. However, rapid development has also brought new challenges. High-quality service outcomes are inevitably the result of high-quality, standardized processes, which necessitates that enterprises drive the industry to implement standardized procedures and strengthen quality management.

JD Health operates an internet hospital characterized by the integration of medical care, education, and research. Previously, it collaborated with professional societies to formulate and implement expert consensus on internet-based diagnosis and treatment in specialized fields such as psychiatry. Subsequently, JD Health established the JD Health Medical Quality Management Committee. As of January 2023, the committee, in collaboration with specialists from relevant disciplines, released the Standardized Diagnosis and Treatment Pathways for JD Health Internet Hospital, covering 19 specialties and 201 diseases. It also introduced four core quality control management systems for internet hospitals, promoting the standardization of internet-based diagnosis and treatment systems and fostering standardized industry development. Hu Yanan stated that JD Health Internet Hospital has always regarded quality and safety as the lifeline of hospital management, building a standardized hospital management system through organizational mechanisms, quality management, practice safety, standardized training, and system tools.

In the offline setting, medical care, education, and research serve as the three pillars of hospital development—each indispensable and requiring parallel advancement and mutual synergy. A hospital’s comprehensive strength and its ranking on authoritative lists are also evaluated based on its capabilities across these three domains. As a new service model, internet hospitals likewise rely on the synergistic integration of medical care, education, and research.

Internet hospitals cannot perform surgeries or conduct diagnostic tests, which has led to skepticism within the industry that “internet healthcare is merely a peripheral tool.” Nevertheless, the reshaping of medical service workflows by internet healthcare is evident. Within these reengineered processes, broader outpatient management and the acquisition of out-of-hospital health data have become possible. These elements constitute critical components of the entire disease treatment journey and have the potential to alter therapeutic outcomes.

However, current research on internet hospitals remains largely focused on improving healthcare efficiency and accessibility, with substantive investigation into disease treatment itself yet to be fully undertaken.

Furthermore, as the number of internet hospitals increases, competition among public internet hospitals and major platforms for physicians has become increasingly intense. Within a certain period, the total number of physicians will not change significantly, and each physician’s time and energy are limited. Even though platforms develop various tools to improve consultation efficiency, there is still an upper limit to physicians’ capacity to see patients.

Therefore, helping physicians enhance their professional competencies and accelerating the development of young doctors will foster more specialists and renowned physicians within the internet healthcare ecosystem, thereby expanding medical resource capacity to a certain extent.

Ultimately, supported by the synergy among medical practice, education, and research, internet hospitals and online healthcare will demonstrate more prominent value within the healthcare service system, going beyond merely making medical consultations more convenient.

“The purpose of internet healthcare is to sell drugs”—this debate has never truly ceased. Drug sales are both a necessity and a compromise.

The necessity stems from the fact that pharmacotherapy is an integral component of disease management; without follow-up medication supply, online medical services would be incomplete if they only offered consultations. The predicament arises because, before identifying other scalable profit models, pharmaceutical sales serve as a means to sustain business operations. Of course, in any scenario, pharmaceutical sales must always be conducted based on patient safety and clinical needs.

Including JD Health, internet healthcare companies are partnering with pharmaceutical and medical device enterprises, insurance companies, and other major corporations to launch a variety of products such as family doctor services, chronic disease management, digital marketing, health insurance, and health management, actively exploring profit models beyond drug sales.

As the industry leader, JD Health already possesses strong capabilities to extensively connect various stakeholders across the sector. In the process of further expanding its scope of collaboration and opening up its platform ecosystem, it is poised to develop a wider variety of user-need-oriented products with its partners, thereby exploring additional monetization avenues.

During JD Health’s Partner Conference, a new policy on internet-based healthcare was announced: Shanxi Province’s “Announcement on the Suspension of Initial Online Medical Consultations” requires that, effective February 10, all medical institutions at every level and of all types across the province cease providing initial consultations via the internet. Medical institutions already qualified as internet hospitals are prohibited from conducting online diagnosis and treatment for patients presenting with COVID-19-related symptoms and are not allowed to prescribe medications for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Since December 2022, many regions across China had temporarily granted internet hospitals the authority to conduct initial consultations for COVID-19 infections in response to the surge in cases.

We observed that when initial consultations were first permitted, a wave of blind optimism swept through the industry, with many believing that restrictions on initial consultations would be gradually lifted. Conversely, when the allowance for initial consultations was rescinded, a wave of blind pessimism emerged, as if the industry had been doused with cold water. In reality, it is entirely normal for policies responding to short-term events to be implemented and withdrawn rapidly; excessive optimism or pessimism is unwarranted. After all, even if the right to conduct initial consultations had remained in place, the limited number of COVID-19 patients would have been insufficient to sustain the long-term development of an internet hospital.

We should take a more rational view: after years of accumulation, the prominent value of internet healthcare within the healthcare service system can no longer be ignored. The industry’s continuous innovation and exploration have long become an irreversible trend. Isolated or short-term incidents are insufficient to alter this trajectory. As industry participants, all stakeholders should more deeply reflect on and put into practice how to develop products that truly align with user needs and ensure the sustainability of innovative models.