Pulan Doctor Files IPO Prospectus: Building Specialized Internet Hospitals for Personalized Matching of Top Experts to Critical Illness Patients
Critical illnesses strike suddenly and fiercely, much like an epidemic, leaving people overwhelmed and unprepared.
Critical illnesses encompass a diverse range of conditions, primarily including various malignant tumors, acute and severe cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, critical respiratory conditions, Alzheimer’s disease, motor neuron diseases, and rare diseases. According to incomplete statistics, the number of patients with critical illnesses currently surviving in China has approached 100 million. However, there are fewer than 4 million registered physicians in the country, among whom doctors capable of diagnosing and treating critical illnesses are particularly scarce, resulting in a severe imbalance in the doctor-to-patient ratio.
For critically ill patients, long-term, standardized, and effective out-of-hospital management can reduce mortality and hospitalization rates while improving quality of life. However, due to the scarcity of medical resources, out-of-hospital management for these patients has long been neglected, resulting in inadequate control of critical illnesses. This places greater physical and psychological burden as well as financial strain on patients, while also leading to a waste of medical resources. Furthermore, the uneven geographical distribution of medical resources exacerbates the difficulties in doctor-patient communication. In remote areas, there is a sharp contradiction between the limited level of healthcare services and the strong demand for diagnosis and treatment.
The growing imbalance between the supply and demand of medical resources has increasingly highlighted the advantages of internet-based healthcare.
Pulan Doctor is an innovative enterprise dedicated to building an internet-based healthcare service platform for patients with critical illnesses. Guided by evidence-based medicine, powered by artificial intelligence, and bridged by the internet ecosystem, it delivers personalized services through a novel product experience. This approach fully addresses patients’ out-of-hospital needs, alleviates the growing workload of physicians, and creates value for both patients and doctors.
Currently, internet platforms targeting common or chronic diseases have proliferated widely, establishing relatively mature communication channels between doctors and patients. Although these conditions affect a large population base, their clinical characteristics result in low consultation frequency. Consequently, most services remain at the stage of lightweight consultations, and issues such as patient activity levels and user stickiness on these platforms persist.
However, for major diseases such as tumors and rare diseases, which are characterized by severe conditions, complexity, variability, and prolonged courses, frequent communication with physicians is required. Due to the insufficiency of effective offline medical resources and the concentration of hospitals and physicians with advanced diagnostic and therapeutic expertise in first- and second-tier cities, patients at the primary care level cannot directly access specialists, resulting in gaps in whole-course disease management. The severely imbalanced physician-to-patient ratio further makes it difficult for patients to obtain expert services for critical illnesses.
Compared with chronic diseases, patients with critical illnesses endure greater psychological, financial, and family pressures. “To ensure the efficiency of the patient care process, the emergence of internet healthcare platforms is timely; they not only improve the quality of treatment but also minimize the consumption of patients’ resources across various aspects,” said Zhang Lilin, CEO of Pulan Doctor.
Recognizing this gap in the market, Zhang Lilin, co-founder of Pulan Doctor, joined forces with three other friends to establish the company, which is dedicated to providing internet-based medical services to patients with critical illnesses.
Zhang Lilin previously worked at Asia Pacific Medical Group and Fuwai Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, where he led the research and development of an AI-assisted medication system for specific diseases and participated in the establishment and operation of the National Hypertension Specialty Medical Consortium. The founding team of Pulan Doctor features a comprehensive and diverse disciplinary background, encompassing professionals in healthcare management, clinical medicine, artificial intelligence, and big data. They possess extensive experience in internet healthcare operations, medical data governance and mining, and the construction of medical knowledge graphs.
The professional team quickly gained favor with investors. Pulan Doctor secured angel investment from Lei Scene Lab, while Wu Jun, the founder of Lei Scene Lab, also joined the team as a co-founder. When asked why he decided to invest in Pulan Doctor so swiftly, he stated, “The most critical element in entrepreneurship is a sense of mission, which must be embedded into every detail of the product and user care. The Pulan Doctor team possesses this rare sense of mission and maintains it consistently. We are practicing a new type of desirable lifestyle, enabling all those afflicted by disease to enjoy the most trustworthy health protection at the lowest cost.”
Within just six months of its establishment in September 2019, Pulan Doctor’s myasthenia gravis platform in China was successfully launched. When asked why the company chose to prioritize product development for myasthenia gravis, Zhang Lilin stated that this decision was made after comprehensively considering multiple factors, including the disease profile, market dynamics, and the unique characteristics of the Pulan Doctor platform.
“The 2018 Survival Report for Patients with Myasthenia Gravis” shows that 25% of patients first experienced symptoms of myasthenia gravis before the age of 20; more than 50% of patients first experienced symptoms before the age of 30; and over 95% of patients first experienced symptoms before the age of 60. “Nearly two-thirds of respondents had their onset of disease concentrated between the ages of 19 and 53. This age range represents the prime of life, when people are finishing their student years, entering society, and establishing careers and families.”
On the one hand, patients in this age group have more urgent needs for diagnosis and treatment and stronger learning abilities, enabling them to quickly adapt to the internet-based medical consultation model; on the other hand, myasthenia gravis is a chronic condition requiring lifelong treatment, yet only a few specialized hospitals and experts across China possess the capability for its diagnosis and management. “Many patients are forced to seek care in other regions, facing significant inconvenience due to travel.”
During the preliminary research phase, Dr. Pu Lan’s team had already addressed several potential issues, such as recommending specialists to patients based on their medical conditions and enabling patients to select appropriate experts according to their individual circumstances and place of residence. “In fact, facilitating physician consultations is the most challenging aspect of platform development,” Zhang Lilin stated candidly, noting that experts have limited availability and cannot comprehensively attend to the vast number of patients.
To this end, Dr. Pu Lan has established single-disease physician networks, standardized single-disease datasets, and single-disease knowledge graphs to break through the temporal and spatial constraints of expert resources, thereby providing treatment management channels for patients with critical illnesses.
Pulan Doctor collaborates with top-tier hospitals and experts in China specializing in this disease category to establish a specialized physician network led by leading authorities. A joint expert committee develops a standardized set of data standards for this specific condition, covering key data fields for collection, documentation guidelines, follow-up intervals for different patients and disease stages, and data quality control criteria. Leveraging technologies such as natural language processing and knowledge graphs, Pulan Doctor continuously collects and organizes patient treatment feedback, automatically structuring it into electronic medical records. This approach minimizes the time specialists spend on clinical history-taking during consultations, thereby enhancing doctor-patient communication efficiency. Furthermore, through the standardized application of the platform, expert collaboration, and guidance, Pulan Doctor gradually expands the pool of specialized physicians, alleviating the mismatch between scarce medical resources and substantial patient demand.
Currently, Dr. Pu Lan has established two single-disease internet hospitals for myasthenia gravis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and has formed partnerships with Xuanwu Hospital in Beijing, Tangdu Hospital in Xi’an, West China Hospital in Chengdu, Xiangya Hospital in Changsha, the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, and the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University in Guangzhou. “With a scattered distribution across China, we aim to maximize patients’ access to nearby medical care in various regions.”
In terms of operations, Pulan Doctor maintains an independent operational network, recruiting partners in major cities across China to coordinate regional offline medical institutions and third-party service providers. This enables patients to undergo offline examinations and treatments following online consultations, thereby addressing the limitations of online services for critical illnesses. Pulan Doctor has successfully obtained an Internet Hospital license. Moving forward, it will expand service offerings—such as prescription issuance and medication delivery—tailored to disease characteristics and patient needs. By providing whole-course care for patients with critical illnesses, Pulan Doctor aims to achieve integrated coordination among medical treatment, health insurance, and pharmaceutical supply, thereby establishing a comprehensive closed loop for both medical services and business operations.
It is worth noting that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Pu Lan, in collaboration with multidisciplinary experts, physicians, and relevant partners, launched the “Rare Disease Guardians Initiative,” a public welfare project that provided online free clinical consultations and epidemic prevention guidance to patients with various rare diseases.
Zhang Lilin revealed that the single-disease platform for myasthenia gravis is gradually maturing. Pulan Doctor will continue to strengthen its physician network and optimize patients’ healthcare experience, while improving its internet hospital in accordance with the overall “one horizontal, one vertical” strategy. “One horizontal” refers to integrating the entire process of online diagnosis and treatment and gradually expanding the range of covered diseases; “one vertical” denotes connecting medical resources across different levels of care, bringing these resources to primary care settings, and establishing an orderly tiered diagnosis and treatment system.
To this end, Dr. Pu Lan is launching a new round of financing. Interested institutions may contact the investment assistant, Xiao Yun, at: DongMai_Investent.