Jizhen Targets County-Level Healthcare Market and Successfully Builds an Integrated 'Medical Treatment, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Wellness' Service Ecosystem
“In the era of internet healthcare, compared with large hospitals, primary healthcare institutions generally lack the capabilities and resources for internet platform development and participation. However, the more grassroots and remote the areas are, the scarcer the medical resources become, the greater the medical demand grows, and thus the market potential available for development is substantial.” This is the stance taken by the Jizhen team regarding the current development of county-level internet healthcare.
As internet hospitals are steadily advanced across China, their development trend is gradually shifting from tertiary hospitals to primary care institutions. However, constrained by technical capabilities and resource foundations, primary healthcare institutions find it difficult to independently establish internet hospital systems. In response, Jizhen launched county-level hospital internet construction services in 2020, assisting primary county-level medical institutions in building and operating internet hospitals. With the acquisition of Jizhen’s internet hospital license, the company has officially completed the closed loop of its medical services.
Jizhen, established in 2015, is a service enablement platform for the medical and health care industry. Currently, Jizhen has built an AI-driven healthcare system with artificial intelligence as its core technology, helping hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, and other stakeholders achieve intelligent operations. It provides users with integrated online and offline health and medical services, including appointment scheduling, online consultations, remote consultations, electronic prescriptions, chronic disease management, health-related consumer services, general and specialized diagnosis and treatment, and pharmaceutical retail.
The Jizhen team stated that, at present, Jizhen will continue to carry out medical services in county-level areas and prefecture-level cities, striving to provide both patients and healthcare providers with health-related services encompassing medical care, elderly care, and nursing.
Jizhen possesses a keen awareness of market pain points, a strength rooted in the medical backgrounds of its founding team. In 2015, hailed as the inaugural year of internet healthcare, numerous digital health platforms emerged rapidly, vying for limited hospital and physician resources as well as patient traffic. It was during this period that the Jizhen team identified many critical pain points.
“Issues such as low typing efficiency and poor image clarity that hinders recognition are affecting physicians’ consultation efficiency, leading to a poor consultation experience and, consequently, low adoption among doctors.” Based on their practical experience, the JiZhen team believes that the integration of artificial intelligence may offer a solution to this challenge.
After defining its strategic direction, Ji Zhen rapidly established an AI R&D center, collaborated with dozens of top multidisciplinary experts, integrated millions of clinical case records, and built comprehensive databases for clinical diseases and pharmaceuticals, thereby launching the Ji Zhen AI Laboratory product.
Jizhen AI Laboratory encompasses technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, providing the Jizhen Brain with robust analytical and decision-making capabilities. By conducting deep machine learning on medical textbooks, clinical pathways, clinical guidelines, scientific research papers, and high-quality medical records, the laboratory has accumulated nearly ten million pieces of professional healthcare knowledge. This vast knowledge reserve empowers the Jizhen Brain to deliver specialized services, including intelligent consultation, medical record quality control, assisted diagnosis, health management, and chronic disease assessment.
Furthermore, building upon its knowledge graph, the Ji Zhen AI Laboratory is developing AI agents with advanced diagnostic capabilities, thereby spawning a variety of AI services tailored to industry-specific needs.
The Jizhen team stated that Jizhen has always been market-oriented, closely addressing market pain points and responding rapidly. Its six major product series have been continuously optimized based on existing products to target these pain points, and are interconnected to form a complete closed-loop healthcare ecosystem.
Internet Hospital:JiZhen provides free establishment and operational services for internet hospitals in county- and district-level hospitals, covering the vast majority of medical scenarios, including minor illnesses, common diseases, nursing care, rehabilitation, follow-up visits, and continuous monitoring. JiZhen Internet Hospital leverages IT and AI tools to implement disease triage, guiding patients toward tiered diagnosis and treatment as well as intelligent self-assessment.
In addition to its standard features, Jizhen Internet Hospital has incorporated artificial intelligence services and a localized service module. Notably, Jizhen’s localized services integrate offline local resources, including private hospitals, public hospitals, private clinics, health examination centers, and pharmacies. These resources are reorganized in accordance with service execution standards and operational workflows, with the aim of fully integrating all data interfaces. Ultimately, this enables the provision of offline services characterized by online data accessibility, high service quality, and standardized pricing for patients.
Time-Sharing Specialty Clinics:To address the challenges patients face in securing appointments and the difficulties physicians encounter in establishing private practices, JiZhen has established a chain of time-shared specialty clinics dedicated to expert physicians. Each clinic is equipped with a standardized telemedicine center, which significantly scales up telemedicine throughput and supports cross-regional remote consultations, online education, and other services. Furthermore, leveraging its scaled telemedicine infrastructure and the specialized expertise available at its clinics, JiZhen has introduced a Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) model. This approach integrates strengths from multiple disciplines to provide patients with optimal treatment plans.
Jizhen Pharmacy Platform:The Jizhen Grand Pharmacy Platform comprises three components: self-operated chain pharmacies, an online pharmacy O2O platform, and mobile pharmacy self-service medication vending machines. The online pharmacy O2O platform focuses on deep user engagement within private domain traffic at the county level. By leveraging e-commerce, O2O services, live streaming, and group buying, it delivers more localized and cost-effective pharmaceutical O2O services than those offered by major tech giants. Currently, the online operations of dozens of chain and independent pharmacies are fully managed by Jizhen. The Jizhen Mobile Pharmacy Self-Service Medication Vending Machine is an intelligent hardware solution driven by IoT technology and 5G networks, featuring chips and smart hardware independently developed and manufactured by Jizhen. It offers four key features: AI-powered medication recommendations, real-time video consultations with pharmacists for remote dispensing, prescription pickup from internet hospitals, and 24/7 self-service medication purchases. This solution addresses the majority of users' health and medication needs while significantly reducing drug delivery costs.
Medical and Elderly Care Service Platform:Jizhen has established a professional platform for medical elderly care, nursing, and hospice services, connecting offline resources, healthcare professionals, and user groups. Jizhen offers specialized service content developed by professional teams, along with a comprehensive system for the recruitment, training, assessment, and certification of healthcare personnel, thereby providing them with opportunities for skill enhancement, service orders, and employment. Leveraging its core competencies, Jizhen effectively integrates numerous offline resource partners and data interfaces to deliver unified services to clients. Users can access efficient, precise, flexible, and professional medical elderly care services simply by logging into the Jizhen platform.
Online Education Platform:Ji Zhen has built a professional intelligence enhancement platform for the medical and elderly care industry, collaborating with subject-matter experts to develop premium courses and providing skill-upgrading and paid knowledge services to primary-care physicians, healthcare workers, family caregivers, and other professionals.
Overall, Jizhen’s medical services can be summarized as a “one vertical, one horizontal” model. The “vertical” dimension refers to end-to-end healthcare services spanning the entire patient journey from appointment scheduling and consultation to post-diagnosis rehabilitation, covering online appointment registration, virtual consultations, e-prescribing and medication dispensing, health product purchases via an online mall, laboratory and diagnostic testing, postoperative rehabilitation, and disease care. The “horizontal” dimension encompasses comprehensive condition-specific services across common diseases, critical illnesses, chronic conditions, elderly care, caregiving, and hospice care.
The Jizhen team stated that, as a local healthcare service platform, Jizhen will prioritize Chongqing and Chengdu as its launch cities, integrate distribution channels across various counties, and interconnect information systems of medical institutions at all levels to achieve interoperability of county-level data. “Taking a pragmatic approach, we will break through and establish roots one county at a time, gradually expanding our market coverage.” By adopting the strategy of “building points into lines and leveraging lines to expand areas,” Jizhen has established a clearly tiered strategic layout for grassroots county-level healthcare services.
Jizhen has established a clear roadmap for business development: Step one involves enhancing prescription outflow services to enable prescription circulation among multiple regional medical institutions on the Jizhen platform. Leveraging the Jizhen Pharmaceutical O2O Platform and mobile pharmacies, it aims to improve medication accessibility for patients and facilitate two-way referrals among regional medical institutions, positioning itself as an integrated provider of healthcare and pharmaceutical services with county-level areas at its core. Step two entails offering health management services centered on rehabilitation, gradually extending medical operations into the broader health and wellness sector. Step three focuses on utilizing the vast amount of data accumulated on the platform to deliver smarter products and services to users.
Jizhen stated that the development of its six major product systems has been fully completed, with plans to roll them out across county-level regions in both Chengdu and Chongqing during the first half of 2021.