A New Chapter of Transformation and Aspiration: Gao Jing Appointed CEO of Lianren Health

He is an “Insurance Pioneer”: During the comprehensive revival and development of China’s insurance industry in the 1980s, Gao Jing, despite lacking a professional background, relied on his youthful enthusiasm for work and passion for continuous learning to comprehensively upgrade insurance business models, driving innovation across multiple domains including insurance sales systems, customer management, and training frameworks. He is a “Pension Hero”: At the dawn of China’s pension annuity market, he established and founded a pension insurance company and spearheaded business expansion—securing the corporate license, obtaining qualifications as an enterprise annuity trustee, account manager, and investment manager, acquiring approval for 35 branch offices, and ultimately securing an “asset management license.” He was among the earliest participants in the top-level institutional design of China’s enterprise annuity system and one of the founders of the country’s first specialized pension insurance company. He is a “Tech Enthusiast”: Confronting the dual “scissors gap” in the medical insurance sector—characterized by a growing disparity between retirees and active employees, and premium bases failing to keep pace with rising medical costs—Gao Jing proactively leveraged emerging technologies such as the internet, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain to build a technology-driven managed care service platform. This initiative helped the government address regulatory challenges in medical insurance, alleviated public pain points related to high medical costs, difficult access to care, and cumbersome reimbursement processes, and facilitated the coordinated reform of medical care, health insurance, and pharmaceutical supply (“Three-Medical Linkage”). He is also a “Cross-Industry Elite”: Capitalizing on the golden era of China’s healthcare security development, he created the “Xiamen Model” for smart medical insurance, enabling the government to achieve “one reduction and two improvements”—lowering costs while enhancing coverage and service quality. He pioneered the “Nantong Model” for long-term care insurance, which received high praise from leaders of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and was promoted as a pilot program, becoming a milestone in China’s long-term care insurance trials. Furthermore, he successfully led a digital health technology company into the Top 20 of China’s Big Data Unicorn Enterprises in 2017, and it was recognized as one of China’s Top 10 Unicorn Enterprises in 2018.

As we enter the new development phase of the “14th Five-Year Plan,” the profound changes unseen in a century are accelerating. The digital economy, with technology and data as its key elements, is triggering a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation. The digital economy has become a key driver for promoting high-quality development and represents a strategic choice for the nation to seize new opportunities arising from this latest wave of innovation. Corporate digital transformation strategies are leading quality, efficiency, and momentum shifts in the real economy. As a priority application scenario for the digital economy, the healthcare sector will accelerate its integration with next-generation information technologies to achieve comprehensive digital upgrading. To address the traditional pain points, difficulties, and bottlenecks in healthcare, it is urgent to empower the sector with data and technological elements, fostering new business formats, scenarios, and models. This will further promote the vertical advancement of the “Three-Medical Linkage” reform toward greater synergy and coordination, thereby providing higher-quality, more efficient, and more accessible healthcare services.

In Gao Jing’s view, leveraging digital and intelligent productivity to serve the national “Three-Medical Linkage” reform and empower the “Healthy China” strategy holds broad prospects. The healthcare industry itself is on the eve of a major transformation, evolving from informatization to digital intelligence, poised to unleash significant industrial energy. Benchmarking against developed countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan, these nations have already completed the informatization of clinical systems and regional health systems, achieved data integration and interoperability, and advanced toward intelligence based on data-assisted decision-making. In contrast, China’s level of medical informatization remains relatively low, currently in a parallel stage of clinical informatization and regional health informatization. It faces numerous challenges, including poor data quality, low willingness to share data, and deficiencies in standards and security awareness. There is an urgent need for enterprises to step in and address issues related to data sources, standards, risks, and efficiency enhancement, thereby stimulating market vitality.

Gao Jing believes that the digital era has fully arrived. In the context of China’s high-quality development stage, the healthcare industry is witnessing “four accelerated transformations”: user needs are rapidly shifting from a disease-centered to a health-centered approach; service delivery is accelerating from a hospital-centered to an individual-centered model; competitive dynamics are swiftly moving from intra-industry competition to cross-sector competition; and resource allocation is rapidly transitioning from optimized distribution to enhanced quality and efficiency. As entrepreneurs under socialism with Chinese characteristics, we must remain steadfast in our original mission of serving the country and its people, proactively embrace the changes and challenges of the times, and drive the upgrading of the healthcare industry through active innovation and reform.

Lianren Health, which joined this time, was established in November 2019. It is a health and medical big data company deployed by the National Health Commission of China and led by China Mobile. As the first health and medical big data industrial group in China featuring “central state-owned enterprises as lead investors, with joint participation from local governments, financial institutions, and healthcare IT companies, dominated by state-owned capital while operating under market-oriented mechanisms,” it builds core capabilities around three key areas: data aggregation, data governance, and data application. This empowers the coordinated reform of healthcare, medical insurance, and pharmaceuticals (“Three-Medical Linkage”), serving the national strategies of Healthy China and Digital China.

Over the nearly two years since its establishment, Lianren Health has actively leveraged the inherent advantages of an innovative state-owned enterprise, successfully established a first-mover advantage in the field of health and medical big data, and pragmatically mapped out the strategic blueprint for the “14th Five-Year Plan” period.

The blueprint has been drawn. Lianren Health has successfully built a framework guided by the mission of “creating first-class digital intelligence services to safeguard the healthy lives of all people,” and the vision of “becoming a world-leading operator of digital health and medical services.” With the core strategy of “expanding full-dimensional data assets and strengthening end-to-end data capabilities,” the company has laid out three major industrial sectors—digital new infrastructure, digital applications, and digital health services—targeting government, healthcare, insurance, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and consumers. Committed to bridging the supply side of big health and medical data (such as governments and hospitals) with the demand side (including pharmaceutical and device manufacturers, insurers, and individual households), Lianren Health strengthens its three core competencies in data acquisition, technology, and trading, thereby fulfilling its mission and responsibility to benefit the government, healthcare providers, enterprises, and the public.

Accumulated AdvantagesAdvantages as a National Team Member: As a designated national team operator for health and medical big data services, the company successfully obtained the sole qualification for operating health and medical big data in Shandong Province in December 2020. With government-authorized data operation rights, it effectively addresses core industry pain points, including unclear data sources, inconsistent standards, and security risks.Advantages in Data Technology: The company has independently developed and built the “Renshu” Data Governance Platform, boasting robust capabilities in data governance, technology, and engineering. It supports massive data processing and encryption. The platform has secured multiple patents and software copyrights in the field of data governance, including 99 patent applications accepted, 7 patents granted, and 116 software copyrights, establishing significant industry influence.Advantages in Data Monetization: Centered on the core business philosophy of bridging data supply and demand, the company offers diversified products to address pain points related to healthcare efficiency, services, and user experience for governments, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and consumers, thereby enabling multi-channel monetization.Advantages in Shareholder Ecosystem: From its inception, the company has benefited from a strong shareholder lineup that provides multi-dimensional support in technology, channels, traffic, and ecosystem resources across various fields, including new infrastructure, insurance, and specialized healthcare.

Individuals are points, enterprises are lines, and the era is a plane. This transition from the insurtech sector to the field of healthcare big data, while representing a cross-industry and cross-sector shift, remains fully aligned with the Healthy China strategy. For Gao Jing, it reflects a consistent and continuous extension of her original aspiration to serve the nation.

Upon joining Lianren Health, Gao Jing will assume the era-defining mission of “serving the national Healthy China strategy and contributing to public welfare through digitalization.” She will take on the critical responsibility of driving the company’s vision to “create first-class digital-intelligent services and safeguard healthy living for all.” Leveraging her entrepreneurial spirit—characterized by patriotism, innovation, integrity, and accountability—as well as her cross-sector expertise in finance, insurance, elderly care, and healthcare, she will lead Lianren Health to break new ground, overcome challenges, and foster innovation in the field of health and medical big data. Her leadership will ensure the final mile of strategic implementation is successfully bridged, establish a core business model where health and medical big data empower the “three-medical linkage” (coordination among medical treatment, health insurance, and pharmaceutical supply), drive the strategic upgrading of the medical big data industry, and serve the Healthy China strategy through new business formats, technologies, and models.