DeYiHui: The Neighborhood Internet Hospital Files for IPO
Guangzhou, November 2019. The winter chill was biting. The Annual Conference of the Reproductive Medicine Professional Committee of the Guangdong Association of Chinese Medicine was held at the Nanfang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine in Guangzhou. At a satellite symposium within the hospital, Wan Yaohua, founder of DeYiHui, addressed 89 clinicians, sharing his perspectives on doctor-patient relationships, his insights into internet healthcare, and the most critical initiative currently undertaken by DeYiHui—the establishment of offline service points for its internet hospital.
Founded in January 2016, Deyihui is an innovative high-tech company that leverages cutting-edge internet operational thinking to explore the direction of smart healthcare in the digital era. Possessing proprietary intellectual property rights for internet hospital system software development, the company has extensive experience and rapid implementation capabilities in assisting major medical institutions in launching internet-based platforms and online diagnosis and treatment systems.
Around 2015, troubled by his father’s painful medical experiences, Wan Yaohua began to explore how to leverage the power of the internet to address many pain points in the healthcare industry, such as the imbalance of medical resources and poor patient care experiences.
Having cultivated his expertise in the healthcare industry for over a decade, Wan Yaohua keenly recognized the prospects and advantages of internet-based healthcare. Following comprehensive market research, the “Deyihui” platform was established.
In August 2019, the Deyihui Internet Hospital Platform was officially launched.
His thoughts drifted back to the satellite symposium. Suppressing his inner excitement, he maintained a calm demeanor and presented his prepared remarks with measured clarity. Within the allotted 15 minutes, Wan Yaohua delivered a concise summary of his “reflections, insights, and actions.”
Following the conference, 60 out of the 89 attending physicians joined the Deyihui Internet Platform via the exhibition booth. “High-quality physician resources are the core of internet healthcare. Gaining recognition from nearly 70% of the physicians makes me feel that I am on the right track,” said Wan Yaohua with a smile. “It feels like the pleasant surprise a prospective son-in-law experiences after winning the approval of his future parents-in-law.”
2008 marked a pivotal milestone in Wan Yaohua’s career. Prior to this, he served as the head of Taiji Group’s Guangdong branch, overseeing over-the-counter (OTC) pharmaceuticals and clinical drug operations. After 2008, approaching his thirties, he chose a different path: entrepreneurship.
As he continued to explore the entrepreneurial landscape amid the rising tide of internet-based startups, Wan Yaohua was introduced to the concept of internet healthcare. The numerous challenges his father faced in seeking follow-up medical care further strengthened his resolve to launch an internet healthcare venture.
In 2018, the General Office of the State Council’s “Opinions on Promoting the Development of ‘Internet + Healthcare’” clarified the service boundaries of internet-based healthcare. Under this framework, the National Health Commission’s “Notice on Issuing Three Documents, Including the Administrative Measures for Internet-Based Diagnosis and Treatment (Trial),” defined internet-based healthcare as comprising three categories: internet-based diagnosis and treatment, internet hospitals, and telemedicine.
After years of exploration, internet hospitals finally achieved policy certainty last year, entering a new stage of development.
Wan Yaohua stated that during the 2018 Spring Festival, some pharmacies in Guangzhou were already able to conduct online consultations with designated on-duty physicians via video and text-image interactions. “However, fragmented demand resulted in low engagement among high-quality physicians, leaving the market largely stagnant. I felt this was insufficient; this is not what I consider internet healthcare.”
It was also at this time, after an in-depth discussion on internet healthcare with Zhou Haijun, a senior executive from the founding team of a leading domestic pharmaceutical e-commerce enterprise and Wan Yaohua’s former colleague from over a decade ago, that Wan discovered their ideas coincided. Deyihui welcomed its second partner.
"Technology is the core of internet companies," said Wan Yaohua. This conclusion was one that Wan Yaohua arrived at by throwing money at it.
At its inception, Deyihui adopted an outsourcing model to build the system for its internet hospital. “Initially, I did not anticipate that the technical aspects would be so complex. I focused more on the practical implementation of the hospital.” According to reports, Deyihui outsourced the information infrastructure development of its internet hospital to a technology company. A few months later, Wan Yaohua recognized the gap between reality and expectations, resulting in millions of yuan going down the drain.
Fortunately, Wan Yaohua quickly brought Deyihui back on track.
Tian Wei, the technical co-founder of Deyihui, is the former Senior Technical Director at Huawei HiSilicon. One night in May 2018, Wan Yaohua, who was struggling with a technological development bottleneck, sought Tian Wei’s advice on related issues, which sparked Tian Wei’s strong interest in internet healthcare. Immediately after hanging up the phone, Wan Yaohua drove from Guangzhou to Shenzhen through the rain for an all-night discussion with Tian Wei. The next day, Tian Wei submitted his resignation and joined Deyihui as a partner.
Peng Liang participated in project development, providing professional expertise in his capacity as Chief Medical Officer; Xu Hong, a senior pharmaceutical sales representative with twenty years of clinical experience and direct connections to over 200 physicians at Grade A tertiary hospitals, was invited to serve as Chief Business Officer; and Lei Jiahua, who boasts extensive financial management experience and a track record in multiple rounds of financing, having served as Finance Director at a pre-IPO pharmaceutical e-commerce enterprise, was appointed as the company’s Chief Financial Officer.
With this, the core figures of Deyihui have successfully come together. Wan Yaohua proudly stated, “Our core team is perfectly structured; what satisfies me most is the combination of extensive experience and strong execution capabilities.”
Amid a favorable policy environment, internet healthcare enterprises have sprung up like mushrooms. Faced with countless platform-based and tool-oriented apps and mini-programs, Deyihui has carved out a unique path by focusing on pharmacies: through unified branding and intelligent self-health check devices, it upgrades neighborhood pharmacies into offline service points for internet hospitals. This enables community pharmacies to aggregate customer needs and post online consultation requests, matching them with high-quality physician resources who accept orders in concentrated batches at scheduled times, thereby providing customers with convenient, efficient, and free video-based medical diagnostic services.
“We have achieved a win-win outcome for all parties.” Wan Yaohua conducted an analysis from the following perspectives:
First, the benefits of pharmacies:By leveraging the upgraded, clinic-like medical facilities in pharmacies, we provide community residents with health services such as physical examinations, diagnosis and prescription, and post-consultation follow-up. This enhances the capacity to promote and dispense prescription drugs, enabling pharmacies to absorb the prescription drug resources resulting from the separation of prescribing and dispensing. It also strengthens patient-pharmacy engagement, attracts more patients from the community, expands service offerings, and consequently increases the revenue of partner pharmacies.
Second, strong physician willingness:Enhanced physicians’ influence within the community and expanded their patient base; enabled more flexible utilization of leisure time to increase income. Meanwhile, internet hospitals are equipped with robust patient management and follow-up systems, allowing physicians to effortlessly manage a large volume of patients.
Third, patients enjoy convenience:With access to face-to-face consultations with physicians from tertiary hospitals, patients’ trust in doctors has increased, fostering better doctor-patient relationships and enhancing confidence in community pharmacies. This enables convenient management of minor ailments, chronic conditions, follow-up visits, and prescription refills close to home, thereby reducing the hassle of hospital visits.
The Deyihui system is primarily divided into four major components: the platform, physicians, patients, and pharmacies. It covers basic medical services such as online video and text/image consultations for internet hospitals, online follow-up visits, prescription renewals for chronic diseases, online prescription review, and electronic prescriptions. For patients, it provides long-term, attentive services including medication adherence reminders, post-consultation medication feedback and follow-up, health questionnaires, regular reports, health education, and family doctor services. For physicians, it offers a professional elite support team and a “three-tier medical assistant system,” saving significant time, enabling efficient diagnosis and treatment, and facilitating scientific patient management. For pharmacies, it provides online customer acquisition features such as posting consultation requests and group-buying discounts, along with a web-based membership management system.
Currently, the Deyihui Internet Healthcare Platform has onboarded 377 high-quality physicians and partnered with eleven chain pharmacy networks to host Online Consultation Day events. During these campaigns, daily patient interactions exceeded 1,000.
After several years of entrepreneurship, Wan Yaohua, now in his forties, remains full of fighting spirit: “Conventional online consultations cannot fundamentally resolve the trust deficit between doctors and patients. We have achieved this, and it will be the trend of the future!” Wan stated that once the product had been refined, he would gradually shift his focus to market development and corporate operations management in the second half of 2020, continuously learning and improving himself.
Looking ahead, Wan Yaohua is considering launching a financing plan.Expand the market scale, aiming to establish 500 “neighborhood online hospitals” within one year to cover the entire South China region, then rapidly replicate the model in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Within three years, reach a nationwide total of 10,000 facilities, provide access to 10,000 high-quality physicians, and directly serve 50 million community patients.