Wang Hang, CEO of Haodf Online: The Internet Solution for Expanding High-Quality Medical Resources
On December 29, the CHS 2022 Annual Gala, hosted by Yiou Health, was grandly held in Beijing. Under the theme “Bidirectional Innovation: Arriving as Promised,” the event brought together leading enterprises at the forefront of technology-enabled healthcare, facilitating a full day of information exchange and insight sharing centered on digital health and industrial innovation. Wang Hang, Founder and CEO of Haodf Online, was invited to attend and delivered a keynote speech titled “The ‘Internet Answer’ to Expanding Access to High-Quality Medical Resources.”
Based on observations and reflections on industry dynamics and trends in 2022, Wang Hang shared the significant value of internet healthcare in expanding access to high-quality medical resources and improving medical efficiency, and presented the practices and innovations of Haodf.com. These insights hold substantial inspirational significance for the industry.
The following is Wang Hang’s remarks (abridged):
Hello everyone, I am delighted to be able to hold an in-person meeting again. Next, I will share some of our attempts and reflections in the field of internet healthcare over the past two years.
Several benchmark events this year deserve attention. First, during the Shanghai epidemic outbreak in March, nearly all public hospitals in Shanghai included the statement “Our hospital’s internet hospital remains fully operational” when issuing notices of service suspension—a landmark development. Second, in June and September, two key policy documents were released: the Detailed Rules for the Supervision of Internet-Based Diagnosis and Treatment and the Administrative Measures for Online Drug Sales. Third, the report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in October featured an important assertion—“promote the expansion of high-quality medical resources and their balanced regional distribution”—reiterating the industry’s focal points and future direction. Finally, in December, with continuous adjustments to epidemic prevention and control policies, the internet healthcare sector opened up initial consultations for COVID-19, marking another significant milestone.
Summarizing these developments, we observe several key trends: First, the principle of “quality before scale” has become firmly established. Second, public hospitals, particularly those at tertiary level and above, have adopted internet-based services as standard infrastructure, while commercial third-party platforms are destined to delve deeper into uncharted territory. Finally, there is a fundamental issue that will shape the development of internet healthcare over the next 5–10 years: how to provide solutions addressing the insufficiency of high-quality medical resources and their regional imbalance in China. This will be the central theme for the healthcare industry’s development in the coming 5–10 years.
The key to medical resources still lies with physicians. Internet-based healthcare has addressed several critical issues in the services provided by doctors:
First, it has enhanced physicians’ organizational capabilities in their professional practice. Previously, the integration of patients, pharmacies, supply chains, and peers was entirely handled by hospitals or specific departments. With the emergence of internet healthcare platforms, physicians can now undertake a broader range of activities, facilitating the reconfiguration of various resources. This represents a fundamentally different model of work organization compared to the past.
Second, it has significantly enhanced physicians' ability to intervene in patient care. Previously, once patients were discharged from the hospital, physicians had limited reach. However, with the advent of the internet, physicians can now extend their interventions from within the hospital all the way to patients' homes, creating a closed-loop system.
Third, physicians are endowed with fundamentally different market influence, visibility, and connectivity. They have begun to cultivate personal brands, leveraging the internet to present their professional achievements in a more vivid and comprehensive manner.
From the current vantage point, despite the extensive efforts made by the internet healthcare sector, two critical challenges persist, manifesting as key bottlenecks from the patient perspective: first, untimely responses to online medical consultations; and second, overly simplistic physician services.
Whether in the internet hospitals affiliated with public hospitals or those operated by third-party platforms, these represent two “ultimate complaints,” the most intractable “hard nuts to crack” in the industry, and also the direction for our industry’s next stage of development.
What are the root causes of these two major bottlenecks? We must revert to the statement in the Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China: the issue lies in the insufficient supply of high-quality medical resources. On the patient side, years of exposure to internet-based services have raised consumer expectations for better service across the board, leading many to ask why the healthcare industry should be an exception. This reflects a broader societal demand for high-quality services.
In this context, expanding medical resources becomes particularly critical. Healthcare service models must adapt to the people’s growing needs for a better quality of life—a challenge that cannot be addressed by individual hospitals alone.
Focusing on the overarching goal of expanding access to high-quality medical resources, I would like to share the explorations and initiatives that Haodf Online has undertaken in recent years.
First, intelligent triage precisely matches supply with demand. Triage is a practice we have refined over more than a decade in this industry, aiming to accurately match patients’ medical records with physicians’ seniority, capacity, and areas of expertise, thereby improving physician efficiency. In 2018, we transitioned from manual triage to an AI-driven automated triage system. The AI identifies medical keywords within medical records, interprets the clinical information, and assigns appropriate tags to route cases to suitable physicians, thus avoiding the waste of specialist resources on straightforward cases.
Second, facilitate the establishment of team-based workflows for physicians in online settings. Physicians already operate in teams in offline clinical practice; this team-based model should be extended to online platforms to broaden the scope of medical services and address the shortage of physician resources, particularly among leading specialists. In fact, many physicians have found that online consultations are less efficient than offline visits after adopting internet healthcare solutions, primarily due to the asynchronous availability of physicians and patients. We have established a comprehensive pre-consultation mechanism wherein junior physicians organize and complete patient case records before submitting them to senior or specialist physicians. This pre-consultation mechanism effectively introduces role differentiation, thereby helping specialist physicians improve their work efficiency.
Third, establish a referral mechanism among physicians, effectively creating a “medical consortium” at the physician-to-physician level. While the concept of a medical consortium is nationally promoted with an emphasis on inter-hospital collaboration, its practical implementation ultimately translates into cooperation between individual doctors. We aim to replicate this process in the online setting by encouraging rapid and efficient case-based discussions and referrals among physicians. This represents a key direction for implementing online collaborative mechanisms within medical consortia, and substantial work remains to be done in this area.
Fourth, provide physician assistants to expand service resources. It is difficult to assign an assistant to every physician within the public hospital system. As a third-party internet platform, we are striving to address this issue by leveraging an open platform to mobilize social resources onto the broader internet healthcare ecosystem, thereby helping physicians offload many tasks typically handled by assistants. The increase in both the roles and number of service providers will bring powerful new productivity to the healthcare industry.
So, who will become physician assistants in the future? We have drawn several conclusions: First, they will undoubtedly come from outside the public healthcare system. Second, there is no shortage of talent; an increasing number of pharmaceutical sales representatives and young healthcare professionals are seeking career transitions, and a large number of medical students face employment choices every year. Third, a crowdsourced model for physician assistants will inevitably take shape. In the face of the rapidly approaching era of population aging, we need more healthcare service personnel to enter this industry. Since excellent physicians cannot be trained in the short term, introducing a large number of physician assistants to share physicians’ workload and improve their efficiency is a highly pragmatic solution.