Medlinker's Chen Junsheng: Complementing Offline Healthcare and Driving Supply-Side Reform in the Industry

What Problems Has Internet Healthcare Solved for Patients and Hospitals Amid the Pandemic? The Answer May Vary Among Different Groups.

For the trillion-dollar market of internet healthcare, how should this industry develop? Against the backdrop of the pandemic, what problems has it solved and what value has it created?

Recently, Chen Junsheng, Vice President of Medlinker, was invited to appear on the “Fortune Relativity” podcast by Fortune China. The two parties engaged in an in-depth discussion on the current status, opportunities, and challenges facing the internet healthcare industry.

“I believe that internet hospitals will continue to serve as an effective complement to offline clinical consultations in the long run, and this view will remain unchanged.”Chen Junsheng remarked.

As a crucial means of alleviating the burden on offline healthcare, internet healthcare has experienced rapid development in recent years. However, a persistent shadow has loomed over the industry, as previously reported by CCTV: many internet hospitals are built but remain unused. While offline facilities remain bustling, their online counterparts see scant traffic. In Chen Junsheng’s view, addressing this issue requires urgent integration of capabilities across all segments of the medical supply side.

He added, “As a supplement to offline medical institutions, if internet hospitals wish to provide chronic disease follow-up services in out-of-hospital settings, we must address how to enable physicians to timely access patients’ clinical information and provide treatment recommendations outside the hospital. In this regard, I believe”A critical core competency is to establish medical infrastructure capabilities in out-of-hospital settings.“—establishing various internet hospital infrastructure components required during the doctor-patient consultation process, including laboratory testing and diagnostics, pharmacy services, nutritional support, and even payment systems.”

In offline settings, patients can typically have their needs met through a “one-stop” experience via hospital infrastructure. However, despite the rapid growth of internet hospitals, very few platforms have established their own infrastructure to comprehensively address patient needs. Instead, competitors tend to leverage their respective strengths to exploit others’ weaknesses. As a result, patients must navigate multiple platforms to achieve optimal diagnostic and treatment outcomes. This approach often demands several times more effort than offline medical care, leaving patients feeling that the benefits do not justify the costs. Consequently, they are unlikely to choose online healthcare services or pay for such fragmented experiences.

By continuously building its internet healthcare infrastructure capabilities, Medlinker has gradually achieved interoperability among data systems. For instance, through its collaboration with Panview Medical Imaging Center, patients in surrounding areas can conduct online follow-up consultations based on test results from third-party medical centers, a model known within the industry as “Cloud Laboratory Testing.” By leveraging its own pharmacies and partner pharmacies, Medlinker has established a “Cloud Pharmacy” with robust fulfillment capabilities. This network not only ensures coverage of common medications across most regions of China but also enables the timely delivery of temperature-sensitive drugs, such as insulin, which require cold-chain logistics. The development of these infrastructural capabilities has not only addressed the majority of patient needs but also broken down data silos, providing integrated services and enhancing supply-side capabilities.

The capability to integrate data is certainly not achieved overnight. Although internal platform integration is a key focus for Medlinker, Chen Junsheng admits that there are still some bottlenecks in the collaboration between internet healthcare and the public healthcare system. Nevertheless, he believes that the current development trajectory of internet healthcare is quite favorable, with policy-driven top-down initiatives and enterprise-led bottom-up efforts working in tandem to promote the industry’s collective growth. At their core, both sides share the same objective: addressing patients’ needs.

To date, patients’ adoption of smart healthcare remains at a relatively superficial level. According to the survey presented in “China Smart Healthcare Industry Insights 2022” released by Analysys, consumers’ usage of smart healthcare services and products directed at end-users is still largely confined to basic functions such as “information lookup” and “online appointment registration.” The penetration rate for disease management stands at only 10%, indicating that deeper-level smart healthcare services require further adoption among consumers.

Healthcare is a supply-driven industry. When the industry’s capacity to serve patients is limited primarily to online appointment scheduling and medication purchases for follow-up visits, patient demand tends to plateau at these services. However, patients’ fundamental need remains achieving cure or disease stabilization—that is, pursuing effective treatment outcomes. This is precisely where internet healthcare must continue to evolve.

It is widely recognized within the industry that internet healthcare has experienced the 1.0 era, characterized by initial market exploration and focused primarily on peripheral medical services such as online appointment registration and lightweight consultations; and the 2.0 era, which introduced shallow-tier medical services including follow-up visits with prescription renewals and pharmaceutical e-commerce.With the National Health Commission’s release of the “Detailed Rules for the Supervision of Internet-Based Diagnosis and Treatment (Draft for Comments)” last year, which clarified the separation of medical services from pharmaceutical sales and emphasized that industry development must return to the essence of healthcare, the sector has entered the Internet Healthcare 3.0 era, characterized by deep-level medical services such as disease management at its core.

Chen Junsheng also concurred with this view, stating in an interview, “Only by adhering to the premise of serious medical care can we effectively empower physicians and serve patients, thereby assuming responsibility for diagnostic and treatment outcomes.” He added, “The essence of serious medical care is to cure patients’ diseases, which entails strict compliance with clinical guidelines and the provision of effective interventions by qualified healthcare professionals throughout the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation phases. In contrast, consumer-oriented healthcare does not guarantee specific outcomes; this constitutes the fundamental distinction between serious medical care and consumer healthcare. Over the years, Medlinker has been continuously optimizing its internet hospital products, aiming to deliver superior services to users through our product capabilities.”

Taking diabetes management as an example, poor adherence has historically been the most challenging issue for physicians treating patients with diabetes. After initial consultations and medication purchases at hospitals, patients often struggle with regular follow-up visits and consistent medication intake, while daily dietary and exercise regimens are frequently neglected. On the Medlinker platform, after conducting an initial offline consultation for diabetic patients, physicians bind these patients to their accounts for subsequent online management. A dedicated communication group is established for each patient, comprising the physician, physician assistants, and health managers, to monitor and intervene in daily disease progression and adverse drug reactions. By wearing FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitors, patients enable their primary care physicians to review fluctuations in blood glucose levels either periodically or in real time. Furthermore, recognizing diabetes as a lifestyle-related chronic condition, Medlinker leverages its product capabilities to provide nutritional assessments and prescribe personalized nutrition plans, thereby supporting dietary interventions alongside conventional pharmacotherapy. This comprehensive approach effectively addresses the previous dilemma where “patients took their medications but saw no improvement in their condition,” ultimately ensuring accountability for patient treatment outcomes.

In the 1.0 phase of internet healthcare, appointment scheduling and lightweight consultations offered convenience for patients seeking medical care, but could not ensure treatment efficacy from home; in the 2.0 phase, online follow-up visits and medication purchases enabled patients to address their pharmaceutical needs without leaving home, yet whether this truly enhances treatment effectiveness remains questionable.As internet-based healthcare enters the 3.0 era, patients demand comprehensive, end-to-end management that covers a broader range of scenarios and delivers deeper services, along with improved efficacy in disease treatment. This requires internet healthcare institutions not only to ensure medication accessibility but also to monitor, manage, and intervene in patients’ disease progression, while integrating additional components such as exercise recommendations and dietary guidance. This may well represent the true essence of serious medical care.