How Fangzhou Jianke Builds a Digital Innovation Healthcare Model Amid Global Pharma's Online Shift

To some extent, internet healthcare has entered an unprecedented boom.

According to the financial report of an internet healthcare platform, by the end of 2020, the platform had nearly 90 million monthly active users. Based on the total user base of approximately 500 million for a leading internet platform, nearly one-fifth of the population with internet consumption habits has converted into users of internet healthcare services. Such a proportion was hardly imaginable during the years when pioneers struggled to explore viable models for internet healthcare.

Beyond the numbers, hundreds of thousands of general practitioners, specialists, and clinical experts are rapidly flocking to major internet healthcare platforms, while large pharmaceutical companies are increasingly pivoting to forge in-depth collaborations with these platforms. Among multinational pharmaceutical corporations, industry leaders holding blockbuster drugs—such as Novartis, Pfizer, Bayer, Eisai, AstraZeneca, and Boehringer Ingelheim—have successively partnered with major domestic internet healthcare platforms to establish online centers. These initiatives provide smarter, one-stop closed-loop services for out-of-hospital patients, encompassing diagnosis, treatment, prescription, and medication management. For these pharmaceutical companies, internet healthcare, with its growing penetration into niche markets, has long transcended its value as merely a channel for incremental growth; it now serves more significantly as an ecosystem partner for commercialization and promotion.

Recently, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical Group, a leading smart health service platform in China, has established a strategic partnership with the Italian biopharmaceutical company Menarini. The two parties will focus their collaboration on key therapeutic areas including digestive health, men’s health, dermatology and allergies, and cardiovascular diseases. They aim to explore an integrated digital healthcare service model across multiple dimensions, such as internet hospitals, pharmaceutical e-commerce supply chains, drug accessibility, patient education, physician education, grassroots community health services, and medical big data.

Fangzhou Pharmaceutical and Menarini Strategic Cooperation Signing Ceremony

Notably, this marks the second time in six months that Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has established a strategic partnership with a multinational pharmaceutical company, representing another concrete step in the implementation of its integrated healthcare service plan announced at the beginning of the year. Over the past six months, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s collaborations with multinational pharmaceutical companies have continuously expanded in terms of covered disease areas and deepened in scope and content.

Menarini is Italy’s largest biopharmaceutical group. Founded in Naples in 1886, the company later relocated its global headquarters to Florence. Over more than a century of development, Menarini has rapidly built a robust product pipeline through a series of mergers and acquisitions, while progressively expanding its commercial footprint into global markets.

Currently, Menarini’s business spans 140 countries and regions across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central America, and the United States, primarily providing pharmaceuticals for the treatment of cardiovascular, respiratory, and digestive diseases. Meanwhile, Menarini operates 10 global R&D centers dedicated to developing personalized therapies for disease areas lacking adequate clinical solutions, such as oncology and anti-infectives (AMR). Two months ago, Menarini acquired Stemline Therapeutics, a NASDAQ-listed biopharmaceutical company, formally entering the U.S. oncology market.

Furthermore, Menarini has established a product pipeline in precision diagnostics, encompassing high-speed, high-precision instruments and reagents for various fields including clinical chemistry, diabetes, immunology, hematology, histology, and point-of-care testing. The company is also exploring the application of single-cell sequencing technology in the diagnosis and treatment of rare tumors.

In 1999, this century-old enterprise formally entered the Chinese market. Menarini has long been distinguished by its commercialization capabilities and was among the earlier multinational pharmaceutical companies to adopt digital marketing in China. In fact, the continuous advancement of a new round of healthcare reforms in recent years, coupled with the widespread implementation of policies such as national reimbursement drug list (NRDL) negotiations and volume-based procurement (VBP), is compelling pharmaceutical companies to seek new application scenarios. Traditionally, the application scenarios for pharmaceuticals, especially prescription drugs, have been concentrated within public hospitals, where pharmaceutical companies achieved product penetration through offline visits by medical representatives and offline academic conferences.

As the external environment shifts, retail pharmacies and primary healthcare institutions—once minor channels dominated by over-the-counter (OTC) medications—are increasingly becoming a secondary battleground for prescription drugs among pharmaceutical companies. According to an industry practitioner speaking to VCBeat, amid continuous market and policy evolution, the share of public hospital sales for mainstream multinational pharmaceutical companies is expected to decline to 60%–70%, with the corresponding out-of-hospital share rising to 30%–40%.

It is understood that Menarini has adopted an omnichannel business model, spanning from medical consumables to prescription drugs. Its application scenarios cover public hospitals, private hospitals, and the retail market, thereby achieving rapid growth in product sales. With continuous policy support for “Internet + Healthcare” and the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumers’ medication-purchasing habits, Menarini is also exploring the integration of more internet-based elements into the commercialization of its products.

At the current stage, multinational pharmaceutical companies primarily conduct internet healthcare businesses through two approaches: building their own platforms and integrating with third-party platforms. Among these, establishing self-owned internet hospitals and maintaining sufficiently high conversion rates across all operational links require substantial investments in personnel, capital, and resources; consequently, only a very small number of pharmaceutical companies have chosen this path. For instance, in November 2020, AstraZeneca entered into a strategic partnership with Hillhouse Ventures on an “Internet Hospital” project to jointly build a new internet healthcare platform, leveraging tens of thousands of physician resources accumulated by both parties to provide online diagnosis and treatment services to patients.

Most multinational pharmaceutical companies have chosen to partner with third-party platforms, leveraging their internet capabilities and resources to build a comprehensive healthcare service ecosystem. This enables precise matching between medications and patients, driving the unprecedented boom in internet-based healthcare mentioned at the beginning of this article. As one of China’s early internet healthcare platforms, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has accumulated extensive medical and patient resources in specialized fields such as gastroenterology, men’s health, dermatology and allergies, and cardiovascular diseases. Based on this disciplinary alignment, it is well-positioned to create synergies with Menarini’s strong product pipeline.

From offline in-hospital promotion to online out-of-hospital promotion, the most significant change for multinational pharmaceutical companies is shifting the commercialization focus from physician education to patient education. Online, pharmaceutical companies reach patients more directly, necessitating a more precise understanding of patients’ needs and feedback during medication use, thereby improving medication adherence. Internet healthcare platforms enable pharmaceutical companies to deliver more direct and accurate patient education, target information dissemination based on patient profiles, and achieve conversion of drug consumption through an online closed-loop business model.

Typically, patients primarily leverage internet-based healthcare services to achieve continuous self-health management, including information acquisition, online consultations, e-pharmacy purchases, and post-consultation care. According to a survey conducted by the consulting firm BCG on the frequency of internet healthcare usage among nearly 1,500 patients, information acquisition has the highest penetration rate (63%). Patients usually enter internet healthcare platforms through information seeking, then progressively engage in online consultations (21%), online medication purchases (31%), and post-consultation services (8%). In other words, to drive the conversion of online pharmaceutical consumption, it is essential to integrate professional digital services into each segmented scenario, thereby increasing patient penetration across these areas and truly establishing seamless connectivity across pre-consultation, during-consultation, and post-consultation stages.

Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s suite of services—including its internet hospital, chronic disease management platform, online prescription circulation system, home delivery of medications, and new media matrix for patient-provider education—enables patients to complete the entire process of online follow-up consultations, medical care, and medication purchases from home, thereby enhancing prescription accessibility and drug availability.

Meanwhile, patients can engage in real-time online consultations with specialists and physicians, who can also access patient diagnostic and treatment data through the platform. This enables doctors to devise more targeted care plans based on changes in the patient’s condition, thereby improving medication adherence while shifting patient management from a treatment-focused model to one centered on prevention and related services. “As medical standards advance, an increasing number of severe and life-threatening diseases are becoming chronic conditions requiring long-term follow-up,” noted a clinical expert. “The expanding boundaries of chronic diseases have generated substantial demand for health management, and it is precisely internet-based digital solutions that make it possible to effectively meet these needs.”

In the view of Fangzhou Pharmaceutical, effectively meeting patients’ health management needs is a crucial prerequisite for increasing patient penetration in internet healthcare scenarios. It is understood that the patient tools provided by Fangzhou Pharmaceutical are built upon a Disease Course Management Center. Within this center, patients can access multidimensional services, including medication assistance, health education, and consultation and follow-up.

Specifically, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical’s Internet Hospital bases its services on physician prescriptions and medical orders to deliver personalized, intelligent push notifications regarding medication instructions, dosing reminders, and prescription renewal alerts, thereby providing auxiliary support for patients’ rational medication use. Meanwhile, tailored to patients’ individual health profiles, it provides disease-specific knowledge on pathology, treatment, medication, and rehabilitation, helping patients better understand their conditions and adopt healthy lifestyles, while also offering consultation and answers to daily concerns and questions arising during the course of their illness.

In terms of service tools for physicians and pharmaceutical companies, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical has integrated extensive artificial intelligence technologies into its disease management infrastructure. By leveraging an automated channel data collection system, AI-powered customer service, and the Youcai Supplier Service Platform, the company has not only enhanced physicians’ diagnostic and treatment efficiency but also accumulated critical patient data that helps pharmaceutical firms bridge the “last mile” of commercialization. Xie Fangmin, founder of Fangzhou Pharmaceutical, stated that the data from the Fangzhou Digital Health Platform can be consolidated to provide data support for Menarini’s drug R&D strategy, enabling the company to better formulate market strategies and conduct activity and business evaluations. “For pharmaceutical companies, this will undoubtedly make the commercialization of new drugs smoother and more efficient.”

In the future, Fangzhou Pharmaceutical will also strive to leverage digital tools to establish broader and deeper connections among pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and patients, thereby delivering more effective health management services and innovative treatment solutions to patients.