Ping An Health Launches Pan-Cancer Precision Diagnosis and Treatment Platform with Integrated Internal-External Physician Collaboration

Long-termSince，Medical ConsultationThe phenomenon of difficulty is widespread，of Medical ResourcesRelativeScarcity，LetQueue、Registration、Numerous processes, including paymentTedious. The mindset of enduring minor ailments to avoid hassle has become a contributing factor to many severe conditions.In recent years,，The state has successively promulgated a series ofInternet Healthcare-Related Positive DevelopmentsPolicy: The Public Is Gradually Developing the Habit of Online Medical Consultations。

According to recent data released by iiMedia Research, the number of mobile healthcare users in China reached 661 million in 2020. Industry analysts have also pointed out that the demand for platforms such as internet-based healthcare services continues to rise. Models like online consultations, remote medical care, and contactless medication purchases are gradually becoming part of people’s daily lives. Online consultations via the internet have become the choice for many, whether for minor ailments like the common cold or serious conditions such as cancer. Internet healthcare platforms are creating more possibilities.

Driven by the pandemic outbreak and sustained policy support, the internet healthcare industry has experienced rapid and robust growth, with widely recognized platforms beginning to attract higher-caliber core physician teams. In late June, Ping An Healthcare and Roche Pharmaceuticals jointly launched a comprehensive, integrated precision diagnosis and treatment platform for oncology. This initiative will bring more renowned external specialists onto the Ping An Healthcare APP, where they will integrate with Ping An Healthcare’s in-house medical team to enhance service capabilities and provide solutions for a broader range of cancer patients.

Ping An Healthcare’s newly launched pan-cancer diagnosis and treatment platform represents another significant initiative to address the public’s difficulty in accessing medical care, aligning with broader industry trends.

Prior to this, Ping An Healthcare had already established a “four-tier physician network” that precisely covers the entire user journey of medical and health services, comprising AI Physician Assistants, in-house physicians, external physicians, and renowned medical experts.

AI Doctor Assistant: Leveraging a knowledge graph covering 3,000 diseases and continuous training on massive datasets comprising one billion patient interactions, this tool enhances physicians' consultation efficiency, reduces the likelihood of misdiagnosis and missed diagnoses, and improves patients' remote healthcare experience. In-house Physicians refer to Ping An Healthcare's proprietary medical team of approximately 2,000 professionals, providing users with one-stop medical services including 24/7 online consultations, referrals, appointment scheduling, online medication purchases, and one-hour medication delivery. External Physicians, as the name suggests, are medical professionals from external institutions, with over 70% being specialists from tertiary hospitals who possess extensive clinical experience. The Famous Doctor Studio brings together authoritative medical experts, including leaders of national key disciplines, principal investigators of major national pharmaceutical projects, committee members of professional associations, and chief physicians from top-ranked hospitals nationwide.

The underlying logic of this system is as follows: it leverages AI physician assistants as the foundation, relies on in-house physicians to provide basic service capabilities for addressing common needs, utilizes external physicians as the clinical backbone to resolve patients’ core concerns, and establishes renowned expert studios composed of leading specialists to focus on specific diseases and specialties. This approach comprehensively accounts for all scenarios a patient may encounter during the medical consultation process.

“Minor ailments are easy to treat, but serious conditions still require in-person consultations.” This has long been a thorny challenge that many internet healthcare platforms struggled to resolve. Today, internet healthcare platforms like Ping An Healthcare can integrate medical capabilities, access to renowned specialists, and therapeutic medications to further enrich their capability matrix, delivering comprehensive, end-to-end online healthcare services that benefit users.

Take the newly launched “Pan-Cancer Precision Diagnosis and Treatment Platform” as an example:

A cancer patient seeking offline medical treatment is likely to encounter the dilemma of “three long waits and one short consultation” (long waits for registration, consultation, and medication dispensing, but a short consultation time). Experienced renowned specialists are concentrated in a very small number of Grade A tertiary hospitals, where patients queue day and night just to secure an appointment with an expert. Even after successfully securing an appointment, they may not receive a systematic diagnosis due to time constraints, and repeated queuing is still required for follow-up visits. Furthermore, due to a lack of professional knowledge, many patients do not know which hospital to visit; conditions that could have been cured may consequently progress to late-stage disease.

By logging into the pan-cancer precision treatment platform jointly launched by Ping An Healthcare and Roche Pharmaceuticals, users can access high-quality medical resources and professional, convenient, and trustworthy medical services. Patients first gain insight into their condition through genetic testing and online report interpretation; following an online preliminary consultation, they are referred to renowned oncology experts for further diagnosis. Ping An Healthcare’s high-caliber physician network plays a pivotal role in the cancer diagnosis and treatment process, while Roche’s esteemed specialists will also join the “Renowned Physician Studios” within the Ping An Healthcare APP.

This pan-cancer precision diagnosis and treatment platform integrates resources such as an AI-assisted diagnostic and therapeutic system, in-house physicians, external doctors, and renowned expert studios. Their mutual exchange and synergistic integration constitute the company’s core competitiveness, enabling further exploration of pan-cancer precision diagnosis and treatment services. By covering the entire patient journey—from genetic testing, report interpretation, online consultations, and appointment scheduling with offline oncology specialists, to electronic prescription issuance, medication delivery, commercial insurance payment, and post-diagnosis care—the platform establishes a closed-loop service ecosystem encompassing testing, medical care, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. This approach directly addresses the pain points and challenges faced by cancer patients during their medical journey, making healthcare access more convenient and efficient.

The healthcare industry differs from other sectors. Patients with minor ailments typically seek consultations with renowned physicians, while those facing serious conditions expect care led by specialists. However, renowned physicians are limited in number, specialists are even scarcer, and they tend to be concentrated in specific regions, making offline medical visits highly inconvenient. How can internet healthcare platforms maximize connectivity between their in-house physicians and external renowned experts?

Ping An Healthcare’s “integration of internal and external physicians” has established a robust hybrid model, fully leveraging external resources to continuously “fuel” the growth of the platform’s service capabilities.

Following the preliminary diagnosis by the AI-assisted clinical decision support system, an on-site physician conducts a pre-consultation for the patient, who is then referred to an external specialist for further evaluation. The on-site physician also provides regular follow-up care to monitor rehabilitation and manage health outcomes. The purpose of this pre-consultation is to accurately assess the severity of the patient’s condition and enable targeted interventions. This approach ensures that common and easily treatable conditions do not unnecessarily consume the time and expertise of renowned specialists, who are instead reserved for complex and challenging cases, thereby achieving refined utilization of high-quality medical resources.

Duan Liang (a pseudonym), a 48-year-old farmer from Guizhou Province, developed right knee pain three years ago due to years of strenuous physical labor. Having delayed treatment for an extended period, his condition worsened and severely impacted his daily life. Through the Ping An Healthcare app, he consulted with Dr. Cheng Biao, a renowned specialist on the platform, and successfully achieved a complete cure.

As of the end of 2020, Ping An Healthcare had signed contracts with 295 renowned top-tier specialist physicians in China, similar to Director Cheng Biao. Among them, 175 physicians collaborated with Ping An Healthcare to establish "Renowned Physician Studios." These distinguished medical experts possess extensive clinical and diagnostic experience, with long-term accumulation of expertise in their respective specialties. Last month, Ping An Healthcare hosted a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) academic symposium, specially inviting Professor Li Diangui, a National TCM Master. With over 50 years of experience in TCM clinical practice, Professor Li specializes in the treatment of spleen and stomach disorders. At the event, he provided training on the "Turbid-Toxin Theory" to nearly 300 members of Ping An Healthcare’s in-house TCM medical team, sharing research insights and treatment approaches for chronic atrophic gastritis from both TCM and Western medicine perspectives. This model helps comprehensively enhance the professional capabilities of in-house physicians. The prestigious prescriptions formulated by these resident renowned physicians are made available to internal doctors, indirectly training them through standardized diagnosis and prescription protocols for specific diseases. Such an approach not only fosters self-sustaining capability ("blood creation") in service delivery but also provides physicians with a superior work environment and improved doctor-patient relationships, offering better career advancement opportunities and platforms for academic exchange, thereby building a dynamic, high-quality medical team. Currently, the number of TCM physicians at Ping An Healthcare has increased by 50%, with steady growth in daily average revenue.

Returning to user data, in 2020, Ping An Healthcare recorded an average of 903,000 daily consultations, representing a 23.9% increase from 2019. The proportion of paying medical users exceeded 35.1%, indicating that a growing number of precisely targeted users with healthcare needs are utilizing Ping An Healthcare’s services.

Having navigated the nascent and consolidation phases, internet healthcare services are now entering a stage of standardized development, with increasingly stringent demands for professionalism that necessitate systematic and specialized solutions. Underpinning the integration of internal and external physicians is Ping An Healthcare’s unwavering commitment to its mission of “building a professional bridge between doctors and patients,” with the goals of trust, professionalism, and convenience, aiming to create China’s largest, most advanced, and most defensible internet healthcare service platform. By accelerating strategic upgrades under the framework of “internal-external physician connectivity” and comprehensively empowering its four-tier physician system, Ping An Healthcare is poised to deliver exceptional physician services to users.