iClear Minghui Files for IPO to Scale Its Industrial Internet Platform for Myopia Prevention and Control Across China's Grassroots Ophthalmology Sector

According to a research report by the World Health Organization, China currently has 600 million people with myopia, and the prevalence of myopia among adolescents ranks first in the world. The myopia rates among high school and university students have both exceeded 80%, while the rate among elementary school graduates has also surpassed 50%.

In response to the increasingly severe problem of myopia, the state has issued numerous relevant policies. The "Opinions of the State Council on Implementing the Healthy China Action," issued in August 2019, specified actions to promote vision health among primary and secondary school students—aiming for the national overall myopia rate among children and adolescents to decrease by more than 0.5 percentage points annually by 2022 and 2030, with a significant decline in the incidence of new myopia cases.

How to effectively prevent and control myopia and protect the vision of adolescents is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed. In cities such as Shanghai and Xi’an, myopia prevention and control efforts have been incorporated into government performance evaluations.

To this end, Da'an Smart Medical Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. launched the myopia prevention and control brand “Eye Health Online,” which has now been upgraded to “iClear Minghui®” (hereinafter referred to as “Minghui®”), focusing on the construction and operation of a platform for myopia screening, prevention, and control.

Zhou Junpeng, Founder and CEO of Minghui®, earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Wuhan University and later obtained an EMBA from CEIBS.

Before starting his own business, Zhou Junpeng was responsible for solution delivery, marketing, and market operations management in China at several globally leading high-tech companies specializing in IT, internet, and big data. These companies include Lenovo, Oracle Software, and the Israeli big data analytics firm NICE Systems Ltd. He has nearly 20 years of experience in enterprise software business and management. Five years ago, Zhou Junpeng chose to step out of his original career circle and devote himself to the primary healthcare industry.

“Currently, China’s healthcare system still suffers from weak service capacity at the primary care level, but the scope of primary healthcare is so broad that it is difficult to identify a specific entry point,” said Zhou Junpeng in an interview.

While undertaking a research project on grassroots internet healthcare for the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Zhou Junpeng observed that the primary recipients of grassroots ophthalmic services were the elderly and children. With clearly identified pain points and well-defined solutions, this sector emerged as a niche market particularly suited for private enterprises to develop differentiated specialties and innovative business models. Consequently, in July 2018, Zhou Junpeng and his team founded Da'an Smart Medical Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd., a company focused on internet-based ophthalmic services, and successfully established the Minghui® brand.

In August 2018, eight ministries and commissions, including the Ministry of Education and the National Health Commission, jointly issued the Implementation Plan for Comprehensive Prevention and Control of Myopia in Children and Adolescents, requiring that myopia prevention and control tasks be incorporated into government performance evaluations, thereby issuing a national mobilization order to engage the entire society in myopia prevention and control efforts. In Zhou Junpeng’s view, the founding of Minghui® seized an opportune moment, aligning perfectly with the national agenda.

“I don’t want my child to become nearsighted like me. Myopia prevention and control can benefit every child, represents a vast market opportunity, is receiving strong national support, and is worthy of long-term investment as a noble endeavor,” said Zhou Junpeng.

Minghui® Myopia Screening and Prevention & Control Platform is a research outcome of the National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine’s research project on “Community-Based Traditional Chinese Medicine Service Models Leveraging Internet Technology,” designed in strict accordance with relevant industry guidelines and expert consensus.

The platform supports vision and refractive error screening for children aged 0–6 years, as well as primary and secondary school students. By assigning a unique code to each individual, the system enables the upload and aggregation of data from school-based screenings—including visual acuity, refractive status, intraocular pressure, and axial length—as well as from professional in-hospital ophthalmic examinations, thereby generating a refractive development record for every child.

Compared with traditional vision screening systems and devices, the intelligent vision screening system of the Minghui® Myopia Screening and Prevention & Control Platform is an intelligent software solution for vision screening and myopia prevention and control that integrates processes such as vision screening, refractive data collection, professional ophthalmic data acquisition, vision warning management, and in-hospital optometry operations management.

Intelligent Vision Screening System (Portable Version)

Zhou Junpeng believes that myopia prevention and control is a form of health management for students, involving the long-term management of behavioral habits, similar to chronic disease management in the elderly. Drawing on its prior experience in developing chronic disease management systems for community healthcare, the Minghui® team has established a three-tier automated early warning system for student myopia. This system integrates factors such as screening results, behavioral habits, and time spent outdoors, tailored to the growth and developmental characteristics and management goals of students at different stages. It also predicts the trend of myopia progression into adulthood, establishes dynamic individual visual monitoring records for children and adolescents, continuously tracks fluctuations in vision, and maintains continuous records of pediatric ocular health status.

Through big data analytics, the platform can proactively identify individuals at high risk of myopia. It implements categorized management for students showing trends of declining vision, as well as those with mild, progressive, or high myopia, thereby addressing challenges in population-based prevention and control.

Furthermore, the Minghui® platform integrates traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory and, in collaboration with the Constitution Center of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, incorporates an algorithm for TCM constitution identification in children. This enables the classification of pediatric constitutional types through simple assessments, providing guidance on diet, exercise, and acupoint massage to correct constitutional imbalances and improve visual development.

Meanwhile, the platform can leverage big data analytics to investigate the relationship between Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) body constitutions and myopia in children and adolescents, thereby developing novel TCM-based technologies for myopia prevention and control. The integrated approach of combining TCM with Western medicine for myopia prevention and control aligns with the direction of implementing an integrated TCM-Western medicine treatment regimen as outlined in the “Implementation Plan for Comprehensive Prevention and Control of Myopia in Children and Adolescents,” and represents a distinctive feature of the Minghui® platform.

The enormous market demand has given rise to numerous other brands of similar screening systems. Compared with competitors, Zhou Junpeng believes that a vision screening system is, first and foremost, an enterprise service software system. It is essential to refine the product in accordance with B2B software business principles, build service capabilities, ensure customer adoption, and enable clients to achieve business success through system usage—this constitutes the fundamental requirement for system software service providers. Software is service; service will ultimately determine the success or failure of the software system.

Typically, the prevention and control of myopia in adolescents requires collaborative efforts from schools, hospitals, and families. Many ophthalmic hospitals also conduct on-campus vision screenings to help government agencies and parents monitor the progress of myopia prevention initiatives and track students’ visual development. However, in practice, most ophthalmology clinics struggle to integrate on-campus screening data with in-hospital examination records, resulting in low data integration rates.

To this end, the Minghui® platform has also developed a comprehensive optometry operation management system, covering the entire workflow including outpatient consultation and appointment scheduling, integration with ophthalmic examination equipment, data acquisition, medical record follow-up, interoperability of screening data, and consolidation of eye health records, thereby helping optometry institutions achieve comprehensive digital transformation.

Optometry Operations Management System

The system enables integration with nearly all mainstream ophthalmic devices and real-time data upload, facilitating the real-time collection, aggregation, and analysis of big data from ophthalmic examinations. Zhou Junpeng stated that vision screening is merely the starting point for Minghui®; its key advantage lies in providing comprehensive vision health management and myopia prevention and control services. Furthermore, Minghui®’s screening and prevention scenarios extend beyond schools.

Currently, the Minghui® Myopia Prevention and Control Platform has been implemented in more than 20 provinces and municipalities across China, including Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, and Xinjiang. It has partnered with over 300 hospitals and optometry institutions, including prominent regional public and private eye hospitals such as the Eye Hospital of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Jiaxing Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, and Beijing Meiermu Eye Hospital. The platform also undertakes initiatives such as the National Health Commission’s training program for primary-care ophthalmologists.

In addition to the founders’ own expertise in information technology and big data, the Minghui® partner team includes medical professionals such as a Ph.D. in Ophthalmology from Peking University Health Science Center and a Ph.D. in Traditional Chinese Medicine from the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. Leveraging its specialized team background and strong market performance, Minghui® secured angel-round investment at the end of 2019 from Shanghai Lansheng, the exclusive distributor for the ICL brand—the leading intraocular lens manufacturer—in China. As most ICL-certified surgical experts are prominent ophthalmologists in the industry, Minghui has further strengthened its connections with numerous ophthalmic experts through this channel.

The eye health market is highly attractive to most industry participants, given its scale of hundreds of billions of yuan and an annual growth rate exceeding 20%. However, it must be acknowledged that the sector remains characterized by disordered services, uneven practitioner quality, and unregulated expansion. Both product suppliers and patient-facing service providers are predominantly small in scale, presenting significant opportunities for consolidation and integrated development. Most consumers rely on advertising when selecting products and services, resulting in a marked shortage of access to high-quality optometric care—a gap that constitutes a clear commercial opportunity for innovators.

Regarding future development, Zhou Junpeng stated that the company’s product R&D direction will expand to include in-depth analysis and visualization of screening data, optimization of student myopia risk prediction models, and the establishment of an internet-based ophthalmology hospital. By fully leveraging the traffic-entry advantage of its screening system, the company aims to build a service platform for ophthalmologists and personal vision health management tools for parents. These initiatives will help doctors implement an integrated online-offline doctor-patient management model, thereby enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of myopia prevention and control.

Furthermore, the products and services offered by Minghui® are not limited to vision screening systems and optometry operation management systems; they have expanded to include value-added institutional operation services and product supply services. This facilitates the deep integration of the internet with the traditional optometry industry, thereby building an industrial internet for vision prevention and control.

Minghui® has partnered with select offline institutions to establish Myopia Prevention and Control Centers, primarily offering services such as school-based screenings, big data management, vision therapy, and myopia prevention program management. These centers have already achieved single-store profitability, and the company plans to continue developing and expanding this business model.

In Zhou Junpeng’s view, whether it is building a platform for screening and myopia prevention and control, establishing an online ophthalmology hospital, or creating a product supply chain platform to provide comprehensive solutions for students with myopia, the core objective remains to better serve ophthalmologists, thereby enabling them to more conveniently deliver health management services to myopia patients. Minghui® aims to comprehensively empower 40,000 ophthalmologists and 100,000 optometrists through its internet-based platform, carving out a specialized and scalable path of innovation in optometry and ophthalmology that differs from traditional offline outpatient service institutions.

China has approximately 2,500 tertiary hospitals and 9,000 secondary hospitals. Constrained by factors such as technology, equipment, qualifications, and operations, some hospitals have not truly implemented optometry services. Zhou Junpeng stated, “Our big data from screening shows that 48% of myopic students do not wear glasses, which also indicates that there is significant room for improvement in the accessibility of myopia prevention and control management. By empowering grassroots ophthalmology through internet platforms, promoting the integration of traditional Chinese and Western medicine in myopia prevention and control technologies, and enhancing the professionalism and accessibility of optometry services, we aim to benefit China’s 270 million children. This was precisely our original intention when we entered grassroots healthcare five years ago!”

Currently, Minghui® is undertaking a new round of financing. The funds will be primarily used to expand R&D investment in the platform, leverage expert resources and the advantages of established partner hospitals, and enhance operational efficiency and business scale in regional markets.