Left Hand Doctor Responds to Surge in Internet Healthcare Traffic with AI-Powered 2B2C Solutions
At the beginning of 2020, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a surge in traffic to online medical consultations. Internet hospitals, which had previously progressed with many twists and turns, saw a significant increase in industry penetration and public awareness under the catalyst of the pandemic.
According to statistics from the National Health Commission, the volume of online consultations at hospitals directly affiliated with or administered by the Commission increased 17-fold compared to the same period last year. Across China, numerous hospitals have urgently launched online hospital services.
As a provider of general practitioner robotic doctor services, Zuoshou Doctor’s products and solutions were deployed in nearly 100 hospitals in 2019. During the pandemic, its COVID-19 response-related products were rapidly implemented in more than 140 hospitals within just three weeks.
When hospitals face a surge in internet traffic, Zuoshou Yisheng leverages its open platform to help hospitals improve the efficiency of online diagnosis and treatment and alleviate the pressure of insufficient medical resources through functions such as intelligent self-diagnosis, intelligent triage, intelligent pre-consultation, intelligent medication inquiry, intelligent Q&A, medication manager, and intelligent disease management. During the pandemic, Zuoshou Yisheng developed and launched epidemic prevention and control products, including pneumonia screening, pre-consultation, COVID-19 monitoring and management systems, and intelligent follow-up systems for COVID-19, utilizing AI to support technology-driven epidemic response.
As the epidemic in China gradually subsides, society is slowly recovering. Hospitals, having experienced a massive influx of internet traffic, will accelerate their digital transformation. Left Hand Doctor aims to become a technological driving force in this digital reform of hospitals. Leveraging technologies such as AI, big data, semantic learning, and human-computer interaction, it focuses on the medical ecosystem to serve the entire diagnosis and treatment process for both medical institutions and patients, helping hospitals achieve “smart services” oriented toward patients.
Since 2010, the concept of mobile health has begun to gain momentum. Since 2015, the global surge in next-generation digital technologies—including cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, mobile internet, and the Internet of Things—has reshaped industry demands and injected new vitality into the development of the healthcare sector.
In 2015, Zhang Chao, former head of NLP knowledge mining at Baidu and a knowledge graph expert, founded Zuoshou Doctor. The Zuoshou Doctor team comprises multiple natural language processing experts and data mining scientists formerly from Baidu, as well as professionals in clinical medicine, public health, pharmacy, and other fields from Peking University Health Science Center. After two years of research and development, leveraging technologies such as natural language processing, knowledge graphs, and information extraction, and by learning from the authoritative knowledge base of the People's Medical Publishing House, Zhang Chao and his team developed a robotic doctor with “knowledge graph + reasoning logic” capabilities—Zuoshou Doctor. This system was built based on tens of millions of de-identified patient records accumulated from nearly 60 Grade A tertiary hospitals, tens of millions of medical Q&A entries and popular science articles, and feedback data from hundreds of thousands of daily product users.
"Left Hand Doctor was initially positioned to target the consumer (C-end) market. However, during promotion, Zhang Chao found that direct-to-consumer product marketing faced challenges, as meeting the public’s medical needs inevitably involved engaging with business-to-business (B-end) industry clients such as hospitals and pharmacies. 'The primary entry point for the public to access medical services and information remains hospitals. Emotionally, people are more inclined to trust a doctor than a robot. By targeting consumers directly, we encountered significant challenges in customer acquisition.'"
Should we continue to focus on the consumer-facing (C-end) market, or pivot to a different path? Zhang Chao stated that his team spent six full months deliberating this issue. Hospitals are where patients are most concentrated, and the core of healthcare service delivery is inextricably linked to physicians. In the second half of 2018, Zhang Chao’s team decided to pivot to a B2B2C model.
Zhang Chao stated, “The shift from a direct-to-consumer (2C) model to a business-to-business-to-consumer (2B2C) model has brought about two key changes for us. One is our customer acquisition strategy: by empowering B-side partners, we have transitioned from targeting a fragmented consumer market to delivering our robotic doctor systems to industry users such as hospitals, mobile health companies, and pharmacies, thereby reaching end consumers through these centralized channels.”
From a direct-to-consumer (2C) model to a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) approach, another major transformation for Zuoshou Doctor has been its product strategy. Previously, Zuoshou Doctor targeted patients in the pre-consultation self-diagnosis and self-assessment phase. After pivoting toward the B-end market, how can it recalibrate its strategic direction to leverage its existing advantages on the patient side while addressing the core needs of smart hospital development?
Zhang Chao told VCBeat that the Notice on Issuing the Graded Evaluation Standard System for Smart Hospital Services (Trial), issued by the National Health Commission, points out that smart hospital construction mainly covers three major areas: “Smart Medical Care” for medical staff, “Smart Services” for patients, and “Smart Management” for hospital administration. Based on market-oriented transformation, Left Hand Doctor has chosen to focus on “Smart Services” for patients.
In the pre-consultation phase, Zuoshou Doctor has developed a mature product suite. It covers more than 6,000 common diseases across 35 hospital departments and features five core capabilities: intelligent self-diagnosis, intelligent triage, intelligent pre-consultation, intelligent medication inquiry, and intelligent Q&A. Additionally, it offers two comprehensive solutions: Medication Manager and Intelligent Disease Management. The triage accuracy rate exceeds 95%, and the secondary modification rate for automatically generated electronic medical records is below 10%.
“We have upgraded our previously direct-to-consumer (DTC) self-diagnosis and self-testing products into a pre-consultation solution designed for physicians. After hospitals integrate with the Zuoshou Doctor Open Platform, the AI-powered virtual physician can collect patients’ basic clinical information through multi-turn dialogues, automatically compile it into electronic medical records (EMRs), and forward these records to attending physicians, thereby enhancing diagnostic and treatment efficiency.”
“Prior to consultations, Zuoshou Doctor primarily helps hospitals improve efficiency. However, we have found that intelligent patient management—specifically, how to connect the post-consultation phase, a scenario currently disconnected from hospital operations—is also crucial.”
The ensuing challenge is that tertiary hospitals, as the cornerstone of China’s healthcare system, possess abundant core resources on the supply side while facing relatively saturated demand. Zuoshou Doctor is exploring how to identify scenarios with strong patient engagement within the limited demand landscape of these hospitals.
Zuoshou Yisheng’s strategy targets the post-diagnosis market by focusing on medication management and disease management. Zhang Chao believes that there is a significant demand for medication management among patients using new and specialty drugs for conditions such as cancer and autoimmune diseases, as well as those with chronic diseases requiring long-term pharmacotherapy. Due to the complexity of polypharmacy and frequent prescription updates by physicians, coupled with the fact that many chronic disease patients are elderly, these individuals often take duplicate medications or fail to adhere properly to medical advice, leading to potential medication safety risks. Zuoshou Yisheng collaborates with hospitals and pharmacies to print QR codes on prescriptions, providing patients with convenient online medication guidance.
For physicians at Grade 3A hospitals, Zuoshou Doctor collects patient medication information through chronic disease management, empowers clinical research, helps doctors better manage their patients, and increases the hospital’s penetration rate.
In selecting disease categories for specialized disease management, Left Hand Doctor has avoided entering already saturated fields such as diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. Instead, it has focused on specialty conditions where patients derive more significant benefits, such as autoimmune diseases and cancer. Taking gout as an example, the excruciating pain experienced during acute attacks leads to higher patient adherence to specialized disease management programs.
Since transitioning to a B2B2C model, the Zuoshou Doctor Open Platform has established partnerships with over 100 Grade A tertiary hospitals, including Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan Central Hospital, Chongqing Daping Hospital, Qilu Children’s Hospital of Shandong University, General Hospital of Datong Coal Mining Group, Hunan Provincial Children’s Hospital, and Shenzhen Longgang Central Hospital.
Next, Zuoshou Doctor will expand its coverage to more hospitals. However, rather than simply replicating its existing model to boost hospital penetration, Zuoshou Doctor’s strategy is to deeply align its products with hospital needs.
In Zhang Chao’s view, given the complexity of China’s healthcare system, the successful adoption of products in hospitals hinges on three key factors: first, the product must closely align with hospital needs; second, hospitals must perceive the company’s inherent strengths; and third, the company must demonstrate its execution capabilities.
Zhang Chao cited as an example that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zuoshou Yisheng launched its intelligent screening system for novel coronavirus pneumonia on January 21. The system was subsequently refined and deployed at more than 100 renowned hospitals across China, including Wuhan Tongji Hospital, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, and Wuhan Central Hospital.
Hospitals at different levels may have varying demands for the same product. Zhang Chao stated, “In collaboration with Wuhan Tongji Hospital, we developed an intelligent follow-up system for COVID-19 to manage post-discharge care for cured patients. As a nationally renowned Grade 3A hospital, Wuhan Tongji Hospital’s primary objective is to monitor the survival status and quality of life of discharged patients over an extended period, with a stronger emphasis on supporting clinical research. Subsequently, Wuhan University of Science and Technology Hospital proactively sought our partnership. As a Grade 2 hospital with regional influence, its main demand is to enhance rehabilitation management for discharged patients within the region.”
From a longer-term perspective, the healthcare industry, which has been at the eye of the pandemic storm, is being quietly reshaped by the outbreak. For smart healthcare, the surge in consultation demand was channeled to internet hospitals during the pandemic, leading to explosive growth in user behaviors that previously required guidance and cultivation. The National Healthcare Security Administration and the National Health Commission jointly issued a document explicitly incorporating internet-based medical services into the national health insurance coverage.
Zhang Chao believes that policy dividends will first benefit self-built internet hospital platforms of public hospitals, accelerating the extension of offline services to online channels. During online consultations, doctors still need to spend considerable time gathering patients’ basic information. Such preliminary and repetitive tasks can be fully delegated to robotic hospitals. This represents a significant opportunity for Zuoshou Yisheng.
Regarding future plans, Zhang Chao believes that the ceiling for Zuoshou Yisheng is not limited to helping doctors improve efficiency. Next, Zuoshou Yisheng will help hospitals upgrade from improving pre-diagnosis efficiency to optimizing resource allocation, and upgrade from improving post-diagnosis efficiency to enhancing the quality of patient rehabilitation.