Baidu Health's Yang Minglu: Internet Healthcare Industry Aligning with Medical Supply-Side Reform Is an Inevitable Trend

Editor’s Note: This articleSource: Economic Observer; Author: Yu Shiqi. Republished with permission by VCBeat.

Established nearlyAfter officially announcing its upgrade to become Baidu’s Health Business Group (the fifth major business group within Baidu Group), the Baidu Health team, with three years of development, has now unveiled new developments.

On September 15, the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu Health. The initial phase will focus on five specialized disease areas: lung tumors, airway diseases, pulmonary vascular diseases, interstitial lung diseases, and pulmonary infections. The partnership will leverage internet healthcare initiatives such as “Precision Empowerment for Specialized Diseases” to achieve accurate online linking and matching between patients with these conditions and specialists at public hospitals.

This model of integrating internet-based healthcare with public hospitals represents a new pathway that Baidu Health has explored over the past few years, currently covering more than 60 Grade A tertiary public hospitals across 19 provinces.

“No one could have predicted two years ago that we would end up heading in this direction,” Yang Minglu, General Manager of Baidu Health, candidly stated in an interview with The Economic Observer. Since the establishment of the Baidu Health team, there have been multiple strategic pivots—from being technology-driven to operating online medical services, and further to deep integration into the industry. “The internal and external challenges have been truly significant.”

Baidu Health was launched in March 2020, a year dubbed the “Year One of the Internet Healthcare Boom” amid the pandemic. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote medical services—primarily online consultations—have become an essential need, with service volumes surging and major internet healthcare platforms experiencing a “traffic explosion.” However, over the three years since the outbreak, as pandemic prevention and control measures have become normalized, internet healthcare continues to seek practical models for empowering the industry.

How Baidu Health Forged a Viable Path as Its Technology-Driven Internet DNA Met the Rigorous and Traditional Healthcare Industry. Recently, The Economic Observer conducted an exclusive interview with Yang Minglu, General Manager of Baidu Health, marking her first in-depth review of the past few years since the establishment of Baidu’s Healthcare Business Group.

Baidu Health’s predecessor was Baidu Medical Search. “Initially, we leveraged our search-centric DNA,” said Yang Minglu. However, she believes that at the time, the focus was not entirely on healthcare services; rather, it was more about meeting users’ needs for accessing health and medical information through its search business.

However, this model soon encountered problems.

“Back then, the quality of internet-based health and medical information was highly inconsistent. With the overall poor quality of online information, we, as a search engine, found ourselves in the position of being unable to make bricks without straw,” said Yang Minglu.

This also prompted a strategic realignment of the business. “We decided to take direct control of operations.” According to Yang Minglu, between 2017 and 2019, Baidu Health began establishing content operations and physician operations teams, directly connecting with leading physicians and medical institutions in the industry to provide authoritative and reliable medical science popularization content. Since then, Baidu Health entered its content-centric 1.0 era, during which a series of products such as Baidu Health Medical Encyclopedia and live science popularization sessions by authoritative physicians were launched.

“At the time, everyone felt quite uncertain,” recalled Yang Minglu. Previously, Baidu’s business was typically technology-driven, with little emphasis on heavy operational efforts, which was not an area of conventional strength for the company.

Looking back, this is now regarded as a fundamental reform of Baidu Health. “It was also from this point onward that we realized the healthcare industry is inherently operation-intensive; no player can operate in this sector with an asset-light model, as dictated by the industry’s inherent dynamics,” said Yang Minglu.

Heavy investment in content helped Baidu Health accumulate its initial user base. According to data provided by Baidu Health, nearly 100 million users search for and read health- and medical-related content on Baidu every day. Meanwhile, changes in the external environment brought about by the pandemic created an opportunity for Baidu Health’s second business upgrade. Statistics from the Department of Planning and Information of the National Health Commission show that during the epidemic prevention and control period, the number of internet-based consultations at hospitals under the National Health Commission increased 17-fold compared with the same period in 2019, while some third-party platforms saw more than a 20-fold increase in online medical consultation volume.

At this point, Baidu Health identified two major shifts on the demand and supply sides: On the demand side, more users are willing to meet their healthcare needs via the internet rather than merely conducting searches; on the supply side, the state has begun vigorously promoting internet hospitals, prompting corresponding actions from physicians and hospital management.

How to further provide services has become the issue that Baidu Health is beginning to address at this time.

In Yang Minglu’s view, content is essentially a one-to-many universal service, where a single piece of content can address the informational needs of N patients. However, in reality, patients often have unique one-on-one needs. These needs already exist at the time of their search but cannot be adequately met through content-based services alone.

Baidu Health’s primary entry point is online consultations, which address gaps in user demand through one-on-one, real-time consultation services.

“Our goal is to address patients’ needs for seeking medical consultations. Following a rapid increase in the volume of consultations, we observed that paid consultations are growing at an exceptionally fast pace, which confirms that Chinese people’s habits regarding medical consultation are changing,” said Yang Minglu.

Compared to the 1.0 era of content delivery, transitioning toward service execution presents significant challenges, as services necessitate the integration of substantial medical expertise, thereby reshaping the entire team’s structure. To address this, Baidu Health has onboarded extensive physician resources, with medical teams currently established in cities such as Chengdu and Shijiazhuang.

“This actually poses significant management challenges,” Yang Minglu told The Economic Observer. “Everyone initially had different mindsets, and we also had to address communication issues. (On the other hand,) from content to services, our operations have become increasingly asset-heavy, and our integration with the healthcare industry has deepened.”

To date, Baidu Health has launched two internet hospitals in Hainan and Yinchuan, with hundreds of thousands of users completing paid online consultations daily.

Medical services have thus become the core of Baidu Health's Service 2.0 era.

In Yang Minglu’s review, during the 1.0 and 2.0 phases, Baidu Health evolved primarily by identifying user needs and leveraging its own capabilities; however, both in terms of content and services, its internet-centric attributes still dominated. She believes that in the future, the entire internet healthcare industry must align more closely with the medical supply side and return to the essence of healthcare.

Delving deep into the industry is an opportunity she has identified, yet collaborating with healthcare providers such as hospitals remains a common challenge for the entire internet healthcare sector. “We took many detours during our exploratory phase,” Yang Minglu admitted.

“We initially explored the business of outpatient prescription circulation and follow-up chronic disease management for patients, but quickly halted the initiative. There were too many players vying for these opportunities, and hospitals were overwhelmed with partnership requests.” Yang Minglu concluded that this path was not suitable for Baidu; instead, the company should leverage its own core strengths to identify ways to empower the healthcare industry.

She also noted that they had considered a more resource-intensive model, such as providing public hospitals with a complete internet hospital system. However, this approach offered limited value, as the internet hospital would remain an information silo after implementation, failing to expand the boundaries of medical services or enhance service efficiency for the hospitals.

“At that time, hospitals and Baidu Health were like two parallel lines; we attempted to find their point of intersection,” Yang Minglu described the situation. In 2021, national requirements for the development of public hospitals were shifting from expansion-driven growth to high-quality development, which provided Yang Minglu with new inspiration.

Yang Minglu and her team’s research revealed that high-quality development has become a key concern for many hospital presidents. For hospitals, especially leading ones, scale is no longer the issue; the challenge lies in how to demonstrate high quality.

One important indicator is the development of key specialties. A large hospital needs to have a group of priority specialties, around which it must continuously enhance its research capabilities, clinical expertise, and service quality.

All of this is premised on having a sufficient volume of precisely targeted patient diagnoses and treatments to drive academic research and the advancement of clinical technologies, which represents a relatively clear demand for hospitals.

“Currently, a significant proportion of outpatients at public Grade A tertiary hospitals suffer from common conditions that could be effectively managed at primary healthcare institutions. However, patients habitually seek care at these top-tier hospitals. In reality, while it is extremely difficult to secure an appointment with a specialist in a department at a public Grade A tertiary hospital, the proportion of patients whose conditions truly warrant such specialized expertise remains suboptimal. This constitutes a waste of medical resources, and the government is actively promoting the implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment. Meanwhile, patients often lack clarity on what type of medical resources they actually need, sometimes leading them to seek inappropriate care in their urgency,” Yang Minglu described the current state of healthcare to The Economic Observer.

“There is an information gap between the hospital side and the patient side. What we are doing is leveraging Baidu’s unique platform advantages to bridge this gap,” said Yang Minglu.

In August this year, when Baidu Health and the Baidu Smart Healthcare Team were upgraded to form the Baidu Great Health Business Group, becoming the fifth major business group of Baidu Group, Yang Minglu announced the phased progress of the precision doctor-patient matching engine in empowering specialty construction in public hospitals.

According to Yang Minglu, this digital specialty co-construction business, driven by a core technology of precision doctor-patient matching engine, was launched in 2021 and has since partnered with more than 60 large public tertiary hospitals.

In business practice, she has developed solutions for integrating information systems with hospitals and created industry-leading middle-platform technology modules, enabling the standardized, high-efficiency development of smart mini-programs and the launch of digital specialized disease clinics across multiple hospitals.

Leveraging Baidu Health’s existing user base and search engine technology, patients with complex and critical conditions can be identified. By partnering officially with public hospitals to integrate online appointment scheduling, these patients can be efficiently matched with leading specialized departments at top-tier (Grade A Tertiary) public hospitals within the region. This approach not only supports public hospitals in accelerating the development of their specialized services but also promotes tiered diagnosis and treatment to avoid waste of medical resources, while providing patients with efficient and valuable services.

According to Zhang Kuan, Dean of Baidu Health Internet Hospital, Baidu Health will increase its investment in the co-development of digital specialized departments over the next few years. By collaborating with key specialties at each hospital to establish several digital disease-specific outpatient clinics, the company will continue to strengthen its coverage across both geographic regions and disease types.

Baidu Health aims to partner with 200 public Grade A tertiary hospitals over three years to jointly establish 800 digital specialized departments. “This means that the vast majority of Baidu search users will be able to find suitable specialized outpatient clinics at nearby public hospitals,” said Zhang Kuan.