Zhongwei Baiyi Files IPO Prospectus: Powering Over 2,000 Healthcare Institutions with Its Internet Hospital Cloud Platform
It is widely acknowledged that the internet healthcare market boasts a scale of hundreds of billions. Spurred by the pandemic, internet healthcare has officially entered an acceleration phase. Recently, VCBeat held an in-depth discussion with Cheng Ruijing, CEO of Zhongwei Baiyi, on the current status, pain points, and future development of internet healthcare.
“Favorable policies and technological advancements will drive rapid growth in the scale of China’s internet healthcare market. While the industry’s promising prospects are widely recognized, it is poised to witness a new wave of intense competition reminiscent of the ‘thousand-group war.’ Particularly this year, it has become evident that traditional medical device manufacturers and software service providers are increasingly entering the internet healthcare sector, making the industry’s rapid expansion and heightened competition inevitable.”
“Amidst the backdrop of functional homogenization, it is particularly crucial to identify key strategic focal points for exertion and leverage operational excellence to build core competitive barriers.” Cheng Ruijing offered this insight into the current fervor characterizing the internet healthcare industry.
“The essence of the internet hospital business is B2B, a model that addresses patients’ fundamental healthcare needs. B2C initiatives ultimately operate on the periphery of core medical resources, lacking a solid foundation and inherently fraught with significant flaws. No matter how disruptive digital health becomes, the central role of hospitals remains unshakable. Major hospitals have recognized the necessity of building internet hospitals, and as these long-dormant core medical resources are revitalized, superficial B2C online consultations will need to return to a more sustainable and substantive path.”
Zhongwei Baiyi Exterior (Image provided by the company)
From the perspective of future development trends, future online medical activities such as online consultations, prescription circulation, and medication dispensing will all need to be conducted through internet hospitals. Various online health services, diagnostic and treatment services, physical examinations, and even integrated medical and elderly care services can be organically integrated with internet hospitals. “In our view, internet hospitals serve as a crucial vehicle shaping the online healthcare sector.”
Driven by its forward-looking insights into the internet healthcare industry, Zhongwei Baiyi has been dedicated to this sector since 2014. By closely monitoring policy developments and seizing market trends, the company has carried out a series of product updates and iterations. Currently, Zhongwei Baiyi has established two core business lines: the construction and operation of telemedicine systems, and the development and management of internet hospitals. These form a comprehensive internet healthcare solution comprising nearly 100 products, including remote consultations, online follow-up visits, Pharmaceutical Cloud, health management, and smart medical services.
In the field of telemedicine, Zhongwei Baiyi has independently developed a remote consultation system, linking high-quality medical resources in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with local hospitals. More than 1,000 experts deeply involved in the telemedicine service platform are all associate chief physicians or above from renowned hospitals across China. While facilitating the downward flow of premium medical resources, this initiative actively responds to the national policy on tiered diagnosis and treatment.
Meanwhile, Zhongwei Baiyi places great emphasis on the development of medical consortia and medical communities, adopting “interconnectivity among physicians, among hospitals, and between physicians and patients” as the fundamental principle underlying all platform designs. By integrating additional scenario-based functionalities, it aims to meet the needs of hospitals at various levels.
Zhongwei Baiyi currently operates more than 20 provincial- and prefecture-level medical consortia, with monthly remote consultation volumes exceeding 5,000 cases for those consortia anchored by core prefecture-level hospitals. Leveraging its extensive experience in medical consortium operations, Zhongwei Baiyi is continuously refining best practices to develop standardized operational strategies that balance the universal needs of hospitals with their individualized development goals, thereby facilitating large-scale promotion and implementation.
In the realm of internet hospitals, Zhongwei Baiyi has established strategic partnerships with multiple leading industry enterprises. Leveraging years of dedicated expertise, the company provides hospitals with an integrated solution encompassing resource matchmaking, platform development, and refined operational management.
The co-developed internet hospital platform, built on a B/S architecture and modular design, ensures stable integration with in-hospital systems such as HIS and PACS to address patients’ healthcare needs across various scenarios. With high compatibility, it effectively facilitates the onboarding of industry chain enterprises required for platform growth, thereby helping partner hospitals establish an integrated internet healthcare ecosystem that combines networked, digital, and intelligent capabilities.
During the pandemic, Zhongwei Baiyi developed and deployed “Online Consultation” platforms free of charge for more than 60 hospitals in Beijing, Henan, Shaanxi, Jiangxi, and other provinces and municipalities. Within one month, the platforms served over 100,000 users, effectively alleviating the difficulty of accessing medical care during the special period of the epidemic.
Addressing the question of “how to ensure sustainable business operations after the initial platform setup,” Cheng Ruijing stated that although internet hospitals are not a new concept, their subsequent operational management requires a high degree of integration across the healthcare service chain. Traditional healthcare providers, on their own, often struggle to effectively convert traffic generated by the “Internet + Healthcare” model.
Internet hospitals are currently in the early stages of investment. To achieve effective integration of medical and technological resources, deliver standardized medical services that meet market demands, establish an ecological closed loop and matrix effect, and ultimately realize a win-win outcome for hospitals, operators, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and other stakeholders, more professional operational management is required.
Cheng Ruijing explained, “For example, the pharmaceutical sector is widely recognized as a high-traffic domain. The process spans from clinical consultation and prescription issuance to prescription review, payment, and drug delivery. This involves prescription creation and circulation, as well as integration with pharmaceutical companies, payment systems, and logistics chains, along with comprehensive back-end management. All these aspects require professional institutions to uniformly manage software, hardware, profit-sharing systems, and other critical components without any gaps. Operational managers play a vital role in ensuring this seamless coordination.”
“Next, insurance is another sector garnering significant attention. This requires negotiation and collaboration with insurance companies to design products tailored to the needs of users at different levels by integrating diverse customer profiles. If the platform incorporates a health management module, it can establish a rational closed-loop system spanning from health check-ups to follow-up visits, and even chronic disease management. This presents new opportunities for medical institutions and represents a business initiative that Zhongwei Baiyi is currently implementing and advancing.”
“Zhongwei Baiyi would rather position itself as the builder and operator behind internet hospitals than merely as a middle-platform service provider for them,” said Cheng Ruijing regarding Zhongwei Baiyi.
Over the past six years, Zhongwei Baiyi has established strong collaborative relationships with numerous medical institutions. During this period, it has developed standardized solutions for the unified onboarding, management, and operation of large healthcare groups. The company has built an omnichannel promotional ecosystem that connects with top-tier domestic and international media, forums, and summits at the upper end, while integrating offline traffic across various provinces and cities at the lower end. Leveraging a multi-dimensional operational framework, Zhongwei Baiyi has facilitated healthy user flow between online and offline channels, effectively enhancing user engagement and hospital management efficiency.
Zhongwei Baiyi’s ability to grasp industry trends and achieve rapid development is closely tied to its team capabilities and corporate management practices.
The founding team of Zhongwei Baiyi hails from investment banks, Lenovo Group, CITIC Guoan Group, and other prominent organizations, bringing extensive resource integration capabilities and business expertise. The management team combines the strengths of traditional medical institutions’ hematology departments with the DNA of leading internet tech companies. Within its R&D team of over 100 professionals, more than 85% are core members with at least three years of project development experience. Zhongwei Baiyi has established a comprehensive internal training and promotion system to incentivize employees to enhance their professional competencies. During the pandemic, the company accelerated the launch cycle for industry internet diagnosis and treatment platforms, reducing it from two months to just one day.
To ensure the sustained vitality of internet hospitals, Zhongwei Baiyi has established an operations team of nearly 100 members distributed across provinces and cities throughout China. This team is capable of providing refined, personalized operational support to dozens of hospitals simultaneously, thereby providing a solid impetus for the sound development of internet hospital projects and the construction of their exclusive brands.
Furthermore, the role of policy in the development of internet healthcare has been evident. Zhongwei Baiyi has established a dedicated legal team to conduct in-depth analyses of overall internet healthcare policies. This approach not only mitigates legal risks associated with Zhongwei Baiyi’s business operations but also provides partner hospitals with up-to-date policy guidance, facilitating compliant construction and operations.
Healthcare is a serious domain, with compliance and rigor as its foundation. “We have always believed that the core driving force of a product lies in its alignment with hospital clinical workflows, its enhancement of patients’ healthcare experience, and its support for physicians in delivering high-quality care. By gradually translating high-quality offline medical service scenarios into online healthcare settings through standardized internet-based approaches, and by meeting hospitals’ needs for practical service implementation, we can truly establish robust capabilities for internet-based healthcare services.”
Cheng Ruijing stated that Zhongwei Baiyi will continue to focus its core resources on construction optimization and operational implementation. By operating behind the scenes, the company aims to help hospitals refine the service boundaries and operational capabilities of their internet hospitals, establish cross-regional and cross-platform data interoperability services, and strive to expand into socially valuable and promising areas such as medical artificial intelligence and big data diagnostics within 5G-enabled scenarios.
The inherent openness of the internet dictates that internet hospitals should not create new silos of medical information, but rather serve as an open and interconnected medium to accelerate the sharing and decentralization of medical resources. Only by transforming the essential nature of the industry and its business models can we truly resolve the challenge of achieving a win-win outcome for both the business development of healthcare institutions and their social value.