Yuanfei Information: A Dark Horse in Grassroots Healthcare Digitalization Serving 50 Million People with 300% Growth Over Three Years
Many significant events occurred in China’s primary healthcare sector in 2015.
That year, the state issued the Implementation Opinions on Further Strengthening the Development of the Rural Doctor Workforce, creating a platform for rural doctors that ensures they “stay put, have opportunities for development, and enjoy security.” That year, the National Health Commission, in conjunction with multiple departments, released the Several Opinions on Promoting and Regulating Physicians’ Multi-Site Practice, encouraging physicians to practice at multiple institutions, particularly in grassroots, remote, and medically underserved areas, as well as other healthcare facilities in need. That year, the state formulated a “roadmap” for the tiered diagnosis and treatment of hypertension and diabetes, advancing the equalization of basic medical and health services...
That year, on Weichang Road in Jinshan District, Shanghai—the city home to the iconic Oriental Pearl Tower—a startup focused on the digitalization of primary healthcare took root like a tiny seed in the fertile soil of China’s grassroots medical sector.
After seven years of intense market consolidation, witnessing the rise and fall of countless enterprises, no one could have predicted that this small seed, once nurtured by dreams and weathering many hardships, would ultimately grow into a towering tree in the field of digitalization for primary healthcare—covering just Xuzhou in Jiangsu Province and Tengzhou in Shandong Province,Nearly 100 health centers, 1,823 administrative villages, serving a population of nearly 400,000.
This “small seed” isShanghai Yuanfei Information Technology Co., Ltd.(hereinafter referred to as“Yuanfei Information”）。
Yuanfei Information Smart Cloud Platform
Since its inception, Yuanfei Information has been committed to becoming a provider of information technology solutions for national basic public health services.
Yuanfei Information, established in 2015, operates independent R&D and operational centers in Shijiazhuang, Xuzhou, Kunming, and Lanzhou. The company provides comprehensive IT solutions for the healthcare and health sector, leveraging leading core technologies. Guided by the “Healthy China” strategy, Yuanfei focuses on digital empowerment in primary healthcare. Upholding a corporate spirit of pragmatism and innovation, it integrates cutting-edge technologies from the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and healthcare. With the aim of enhancing service quality at primary medical and health institutions and improving residents’ health management capabilities, Yuanfei consolidates three smart service scenarios: family doctor services, public health examinations, and chronic disease early warning. Its offerings include a National Basic Public Health Service Platform for primary care; a parallel intelligent physical examination system; a Medical-Preventive Integration Chronic Disease Early Warning Management Center; a Family Doctor Contracting Platform with a full-process closed-loop performance system; a telemedicine system; a Resident Health Management Platform; smart hospitals and home sickbed services; and Medical Community Consortium projects. The company is dedicated to building a new data-driven model for Yuanfei Health’s digital empowerment.
Company Founder: Wang XianzhongHailing from a village and town in Hebei Province, he embodies the simplicity, reserve, and diligence characteristic of people from the region. Prior to 2015, he served as the Sales Director for East China at a pharmaceutical company in Hebei, where he worked diligently for sixteen years. During this period, he led his team to achieve an annual sales target of RMB 120 million and secured the top sales performer title within the company for three consecutive years.
Wang Xianzhong, Founder of Yuanfei Information
Wang Xianzhong candidly admitted that his motivation for entrepreneurship stemmed from his deep concern for his mother. “My mother is overweight and suffers from a range of age-related chronic conditions, including heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. Each time she took her tricycle to the township health center to pick up large quantities of medication, the round trip consumed a considerable amount of time. Moreover, after returning home, the heavy medication regimen adversely affected her stomach, yet discontinuing the drugs was not an option. Witnessing this left me feeling both heartbroken and distressed. At that point, I resolved to create a platform that would enable older adults to receive early detection, prevention, and treatment without the need for cumbersome travel.”
Later, on a business trip by chance, Wang Xianzhong met a leader from the provincial health commission during the journey. Over a distance of more than 400 kilometers, the two had an engaging conversation about grassroots medical care. Wang shared many of his thoughts and ideas, while the leader offered numerous insights and opinions. This encounter greatly inspired Wang and boosted his confidence.
Not long after, Yuanfei Information was thus born.
To address the weaknesses in primary healthcare, the state has successively introduced a series of favorable policies in recent years. Not long ago, the State Council issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for Digital Economy Development," pointing out that "prevention first and strengthening primary care" is a basic principle, and proposing to accelerate the development of internet hospitals and promote internet medical services such as health consultations, online diagnosis and treatment, and remote consultations. The Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed "advancing the Healthy China strategy and prioritizing the protection of people's health," promoting the expansion of high-quality medical resources and their balanced regional distribution, and enhancing the capacity of primary healthcare institutions in disease prevention, treatment, and health management. This marks a shift from being "medical care-centered" to being "health management and prevention-centered."
However, primary healthcare faces challenges such as staff shortages, dispersed personnel, heavy workloads, high work pressure, low efficiency, high service costs, error-prone multi-step data entry, and health data silos. For local elderly residents, issues such as inconvenient access to medical care, difficulties in seeking treatment, and the need to travel back and forth on an empty stomach for check-ups have become urgent practical problems that require immediate attention.
“The root cause is that primary care physicians lack flexible, user-friendly, and effective tools when they go to the ‘front lines.’ Without establishing town-village integration as a foundation, digital platforms will struggle to gain traction,” Wang Xianzhong, founder of Yuanfei Information, told VCBeat. He explained that enabling intelligent, dynamic health management at the town and village levels by empowering primary care physicians with smart tools—thereby freeing up their labor so they can better serve residents—has been both the original mission and the unwavering commitment of Yuanfei Information over the past seven years.
Aligning with the "Thousand Counties Initiative" and the medical-prevention integration requirements for chronic disease management under the framework of "Joint Management of Three Highs and Concurrent Prevention of Six Diseases," Yuanfei Information has launched a regional chronic disease management center solution. Grounded in the context of the "Thousand Counties Project," this solution builds upon traditional chronic disease management by leveraging digitalization and informatization as key drivers. It applies technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) to healthcare scenarios, thereby establishing a national health stewardship system for the new era. Through an interconnected underlying data platform, the solution achieves "unified standards, aggregated information, and shared data," enabling multi-dimensional applications. It establishes three core business platforms: a comprehensive supervision platform for management (regulator side), a medical collaboration platform for healthcare services (physician side), and a health service platform for the public (resident side). This facilitates a transition from a "medical care-centric" model to one centered on "health management, prevention, and control."
First, Yuanfei Information's Chronic Disease Management CenterCapable of integrating hospital HIS and LIS systems with public health platforms, as well as electronic medical record (EMR) and imaging systems., forming a robust lever for diagnosis and treatment.
Secondly,Established Interconnectivity Between County-Level Hospitals and Township Health Centers, achieving integration of township and village healthcare to bridge the "last mile." This assists primary care physicians in more comprehensively and rapidly accessing patients' medical histories, thereby improving diagnostic efficiency and facilitating appropriate medication decisions. Furthermore, through interoperability and actual data sharing, the "last mile" is effectively bridged.
Furthermore, patients canView Your Past Health Checkup Records via WeChat Mini Program, also throughRemote Connection...enabling patients to consult and communicate with specialists from major hospitals without leaving their homes or villages.
Finally, adhering to the philosophy that prevention is better than cure, Yuanfei Information’s Chronic Disease Management Center also providesExercise and Health Coaching, Dietary PlanningRecommendations and other content encourage patients to reduce medication reliance through lifestyle modifications. By leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing, unified management of diverse vital sign data within the region is achieved. This integrates networks for blood pressure, blood glucose, and wearable devices into a single platform, ensuring extensive grassroots coverage, rapid interpretation of risk alerts, multi-parameter physiological data analysis, and efficient information sharing for swift patient transfer. These efforts realize the goal of collaborative regional chronic disease management, extending high-quality medical resources to the primary care level, serving patients throughout the entire cycle of prevention, screening, and intervention, and providing comprehensive, sustainable services to primary healthcare institutions.
Currently, Yuanfei Information’s regional chronic disease management solution has been deployed in multiple hospitals listed in the “Thousand Counties Project.” Meanwhile, medical institutions across various regions have partnered with Yuanfei to implement regional chronic disease management platforms, break down data silos, precisely empower the smart development of primary healthcare, enhance the service capabilities of grassroots hospitals, and facilitate the implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment policies.
Yuanfei Family Doctor Contracted Service Solution is primarily designed to promote the comprehensive coverage of the family doctor contracting system, meet the management and assessment requirements of health commissions at all levels for grassroots institutions such as community health centers, and build a service system that serves the entire population, covers the full life cycle, integrates resources from primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare providers, and establishes a "trinity" service model. By combining hardware and software to deploy products at the grassroots level, this solution features a unique à la carte personalized contracting model that effectively increases the family doctor contract signing rate, enhances residents’ sense of gain, and provides thoughtful services to every resident. It satisfies local governments’ requirements for both the implementation and final execution of family doctor and public health management systems. Meanwhile, the solution strengthens patient feedback mechanisms and improves the service efficiency of family doctors. Both the signing and fulfillment of family doctor contracts are conducted through intelligent terminals and the Yuanfei Family Doctor Contracting and Fulfillment Service Platform (physician side/resident side), significantly reducing manual intervention. Residents’ health conditions and service requests can be directly connected to grassroots medical institutions and addressed promptly.
With the software in place, the hardware must keep pace. Taking into account the accessibility of medical services and the ease of operation, Yuanfei Information has made substantial efforts to develop a family doctor contract fulfillment all-in-one device for physicians—a convenient and practical solution that can rightly be called a “portable health examination center.”
Yuanfei Information’s Self-Developed All-in-One Device for Family Doctor Contracting and Service Fulfillment
This device adopts a highly integrated design, enabling routine health assessments such as body temperature, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation, total cholesterol, waist-to-hip ratio, uric acid, routine urinalysis, blood glucose, hemoglobin, and 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG). It also integrates the family doctor workstation to support follow-up management and psychological testing. Furthermore, it features real-time data upload capabilities, automatically transmitting data to workstations, health platforms, the Health Bureau’s electronic health record repository, and hospital Hospital Information Systems (HIS), thereby significantly enhancing data interoperability.
The device is portable and easy to operate. It features a built-in second-generation resident identity card reader, allowing residents to log in to create health records or update health data by swiping their ID cards. This eliminates issues associated with paper-based records, such as inaccurate entries and the need for physical storage space. Since its launch, it has received consistent acclaim from both house-call physicians and residents.
Primary Care Physicians Use Contract Fulfillment Kiosks to Serve Residents
As a council member of the Shanghai Software Industry Association, Yuanfei Technology is not only an application software development company but also a manufacturer and distributor of intelligent health monitoring devices, truly achieving dual certification in “Internet + Healthcare.”
“I have always positioned our company as a ‘service steward,’ leveraging our platform to empower stakeholders and utilizing our intelligent tools for data processing to lay a solid foundation for the digitalization of primary healthcare,” Wang Xianzhong replied, noting that if foundational services are not firmly established, even the most advanced technologies will remain “castles in the air.”
The immense potential of the primary healthcare market is beyond doubt. However, effective implementation remains a “grueling” and “labor-intensive” endeavor. Wang Xianzhong frankly pointed out that while many large enterprises with substantial capital and resources are involved in the digitalization of primary healthcare, Yuanfei Information has managed to carve out its own niche and “break through the encirclement.” This success hinges on two key strategies:First, stay grounded; second, listen to the public voice.Yuanfei Medical endures hardships and dedicates itself to meticulous, labor-intensive work, “taking on all the tasks that large companies are unwilling to undertake.”
It is precisely this spirit of perseverance and resilience that has enabled Yuanfei Information, founded over seven years ago, to grow from a one-person operation to a team of more than 130 employees, and to expand its presence from a single city to cover Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Gansu, and other regions.19 Provinces, for220 counties and districts、Over 2,700Healthcare institutions provide comprehensive smart healthcare system solutions, with products covering over300,000Home, Comprehensive Services50 millionPopulation.
Every honor is a medal for Yuanfei Information.
It is reported that Yuanfei Information'sRevenue increased by more than 300% cumulatively from 2018 to 2021.Next, Yuanfei Information will continue to expand into East China, North China, and Northwest China.The company is currently seeking financing.
The preface of *Thirty Years of Turbulence* reads: “When this era arrives, it comes with irresistible force. All things grow wildly; dust and dawn flourish in grandeur. Rivers converge into mighty streams, and nameless hills rise into peaks. For a moment, the world becomes boundlessly vast.” Perhaps, Yuanfei Information is the most vivid and moving embodiment of this spirit.