Lead Medical Secures Tens of Millions in Series A2 Funding Led by SIG to Expand Domestic Smart Healthcare Services

Following the completion of its tens-of-millions-yuan Series A1 financing round in October 2019, Lida Rongyi, a medical technology service company specializing in data integration and data services for cardiology and obstetrics/gynecology, has recently announced new developments.

VCBeat has learned that Lida Rongyi completed its tens-of-millions-of-yuan A2 round of financing in May 2020, led by SIG (Susquehanna International Group) and participated in by Daya Venture Capital. The funds from this round will be used to accelerate the in-depth deployment of its products in the Chinese market.

Founded in July 2015, Lida Rongyi has developed intelligent services such as a clinical diagnosis and treatment follow-up record system, a medical data analysis service system, and a patient management community, based on in-depth research into the diverse demands of clinical applications. Centered on the industrial ecosystem of individual hospital departments, it has built a relatively comprehensive integrated solution for clinical intelligence.

It is understood that Lida Rongyi’s current intelligent medical services have reached a relatively mature stage in improving the operational efficiency and quality of individual clinical departments. Since 2019, the company has initiated its market expansion in leading hospitals across multiple provinces in China. In 2020, Lida Rongyi will comprehensively accelerate its business deployment in first- and second-tier cities nationwide.

Prior to founding his startup, Xu Junjie, CEO of Lida Rongyi, had long focused on the fields of cardiovascular interventional therapy and informatization, gaining deep insight into the pain points of cardiology. After completing his undergraduate and master’s degrees in biomechanics at prestigious universities abroad, Xu went on to study clinical medicine and internal medicine (cardiovascular) at Peking University Health Science Center and Peking Union Medical College Hospital. During this period, he also branched out into multiple disciplines, including neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and finance, evolving into a multidisciplinary professional.

“The primary issue that intelligent healthcare must address is to liberate medical staff from cumbersome tasks, enabling them to devote more time and energy to patient care, departmental development, clinical research, and other responsibilities,” said Xu Junjie in an interview.

The White Paper on the Practice Status of Chinese Physicians, released by the Chinese Medical Doctor Association in 2018, shows that physicians in secondary and tertiary hospitals work an average of more than 50 hours per week, with clinical surgical departments having the longest weekly working hours at 53.30 hours.

The prevalence of overtime work among physicians is not only attributable to the year-on-year increase in patient visits at medical institutions, but also largely stems from an uneven distribution of daily working hours. According to data from DXY, in specialized departments, more than 40% of physicians’ time is occupied by non-clinical tasks, including continuing education, administrative management, and attendance at forums and conferences.

To this end, over the past five years, Lida Rongyi has been exploring ways to alleviate the cumbersome workload of healthcare professionals. It is committed to delivering in-depth services for specific diseases within individual departments by integrating into clinical pathways spanning screening, outpatient diagnosis and treatment, surgery, and follow-up. By leveraging intelligent healthcare and data services to connect upstream and downstream processes across all stages of care for these specific diseases and departments, Lida Rongyi has successfully transitioned from data integration to practical data application.

Lida Rongyi currently boasts a core team of nearly 100 members and an advisory board of over 40 top-tier medical experts in China. It strives to embed the most professional medical theories and extensive clinical experience into every aspect of data integration and ecosystem consolidation, thereby delivering intelligent services that are natural, familiar, and aligned with physicians’ daily clinical workflows. Its current business portfolio spans multiple sectors, including intelligent systems, data services, postoperative follow-up management, and industrial ecosystem services.

“Standardized, structured, and specialized data can fundamentally reduce the tediousness and complexity faced by healthcare professionals in searching, organizing, and collecting data. Meanwhile, it enables the derivation of more group relationships from continuously accumulating data pools, thereby adapting to a wider range of currently unknown application needs.” In Xu Junjie’s view, if the healthcare industry is to achieve true intelligence, it must first lay a solid foundation for underlying data work, including clean, complete, and appropriately granular data. While the latter two aspects require technical support, they rely even more on the effective acceptance by clinical staff in practical operations, as the essence of intelligent services lies in addressing the core needs of medicine and healthcare.

In terms of underlying data standards for the development of smart healthcare, Lida Rongyi has dedicated substantial human resources and technical support to design intelligent medical knowledge graphs for multiple single-disease conditions. These graphs encompass tens of thousands of standardized structured data dimensions, enabling flexible recombination of data granularity under the guidance of diverse application requirements, thereby facilitating the reconstruction of data dimensions.

At the level of single-disease surgical procedures alone, Lida Rongyi has established thousands of structured data dimensions that comply with international standards. The sufficiently fine data granularity covers over 99% of key intraoperative data, with more than 95% being structured data, reducing the data entry error rate to below 1%. After a single entry, at least 55% of labor costs can be saved in repeated storage, retrieval, and organization.

Healthcare is a field that demands a high level of professional expertise. As artificial intelligence, big data, and other scientific technologies begin to support medical services and usher in the era of intelligence, the initial objectives have largely focused on optimizing operational efficiency and improving the quality and environment of healthcare delivery. However, the most fundamental goal should remain centered on the medical services themselves.

“The development of smart healthcare, empowered by intelligent technologies, must always ensure professionalism in medical and clinical services, thereby truly meeting the practical application needs of healthcare professionals,” introduced Xu Junjie. For instance, in constructing specialty-specific dictionaries for individual diseases and departments, Lida Rongyi mandates more rigorous standardization and extensibility to address diverse clinical demands, such as breaking down “data silos,” ensuring data quality, and enabling multi-scenario application and reuse of data.

SIG investor Yan Qinglong also stated that the development of both internet healthcare and smart healthcare varies across different clinical departments; the key lies in whether products can truly meet the diverse needs of these clinical specialties.

SIG is a US-headquartered, globally leading quantitative trading financial firm. With its unique innovative and rigorous trading philosophy and technology, SIG is a global leader and innovator in high-performance, low-latency trading. Over the past 30 years, SIG has invested in global markets, earning an international reputation particularly in the pricing and trading of financial derivatives. The company employs more than 1,800 people worldwide. SIG entered China in 2005 and maintains an independent venture capital team that invests its own capital in innovative Chinese companies.

Daya Venture Capital was established in 1998 as an early-stage venture capital fund. Its investment sectors include energy, artificial intelligence, smart machinery, biopharmaceuticals, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), agricultural technology, green energy technology, and online new media. The fund currently has a size of approximately USD 60 million.