GuKan Healthcare Management: Serving 150,000 Doctors Annually and Accelerating Growth through Hospital Administrative Digitization

In recent years, the benefits of healthcare informatization have gradually extended from facilitating outpatient care for patients outside hospitals to empowering efficient internal management within hospitals.

Gukan Hospital Management, jokingly referred to by its founder Yang Jianjun as a “veteran of the healthcare industry,” is an information technology service provider dedicated to enhancing hospital management efficiency.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, Gukan Healthcare Management has developed business segments spanning three tiers: patient care scenarios, medical data operations, and hospital administrative efficiency. Its offerings range from “one-stop” product operation solutions to smart hospital management tools, serving more than 500 hospitals across China. Since expanding into the new ecosystem of DingTalk’s Future Hospital in late 2018, Gukan Healthcare Management has become the fastest-growing service provider on the DingTalk healthcare platform.

Yang Jianjun, Founder of Gu Kan Healthcare Management

During CHIMA 2019, VCBeat met with Yang Jianjun. He had just attended the DingTalk Healthcare awards ceremony alongside representatives from three other service providers in the new ecosystem, where GuKan Hospital Management received the Annual Best Operational Service Award.

Gukan Healthcare Management is, in fact, a sub-sector of Gukan Information, a smart healthcare service provider.

At its inception, GuKan Information’s core business was providing one-stop smart healthcare solutions. By 2018, despite repeated successes in its primary market, Yang Jianjun still harbored concerns about the limited growth ceiling of consumer-facing (2C) medical informatization. During a conversation with Wang Hongshuai, Healthcare Director at DingTalk, Yang identified an opportunity to expand into business-to-business (2B) services by focusing on the digitalization of hospital administrative management.

“Administrative management is not tied to clinical operations, allowing digital solutions to be rapidly deployed. Moreover, hospitals have a strong demand for improving administrative efficiency. Therefore, investing in administrative management represents a promising strategy for achieving rapid advancement,” said Yang Jianjun.

In mid-June 2018, Gukan Hospital Management launched its first hospital project at Zhejiang Provincial People’s Hospital, and subsequently expanded rapidly across hospitals at all levels in Hangzhou.

As a core component of GuKan Hospital Management, the contract management solution establishes a closed-loop management mechanism covering the entire lifecycle—from preliminary feasibility studies and budget execution to procurement management, contract signing, performance monitoring, and archival. It builds an economic contract information management platform that aligns with modern hospital management requirements and complies with government accounting standards. The solution aims to address longstanding issues such as unclear visibility into budget and contract execution progress, cumbersome and slow procurement processes, difficulties in contract archiving and retrieval, and the lack of refined contract management.

The contract management solution features three key capabilities: contract lifecycle management, online contract management, and contract operations and maintenance management. By focusing on granular details, it ensures transparency and completeness of information throughout the contract process.

Yang Jianjun told VCBeat that although hospital internal control management is not directly linked to clinical operations, it can significantly impact them. Through adverse event reporting and mobile ward round functionalities, Gu Kan Medical Management has established a feedback mechanism between internal control management and clinical operations, and is currently exploring additional effective ways to bridge the two.

“Xuexi Qiangyuan” is Gukan Medical Management’s flagship product. Yang Jianjun believes that enhancing the professional competencies of healthcare workers will significantly optimize hospital operational efficiency.

To this end, GuKan Medical Management has developed the “Learning-Powered Hospital” platform, aiming to establish a high-quality learning platform based on healthcare institutions across China and designed for all medical professionals.

The platform’s credit management and online learning operations functions provide end-to-end support for scheduling learning tasks, tracking the learning process, and monitoring learning outcomes. Furthermore, they enable quantification of training effectiveness, thereby establishing a robust incentive mechanism for self-directed learning.

Furthermore, hospitals can independently build their own knowledge bases, define multi-level course catalogs, and construct comprehensive training curricula on the “Xuexi Qiangyuan” platform. This facilitates rapid access to required knowledge for staff while enabling cloud-based course storage.

“Xuexi Qiangyuan” makes full use of physicians’ fragmented time to handle tasks beyond clinical duties. Taking spot checks for hospital accreditation as an example, medical staff previously had to cram on complex business knowledge outside their scope of responsibility, which was difficult and inefficient. “Xuexi Qiangyuan” enables healthcare professionals to accumulate knowledge through daily learning, tracks their progress, and motivates them through a points-based system and public recognition, thereby creating a closed-loop learning ecosystem.

As a traditional business segment of Gukan Medical Management, the one-stop smart hospital solution has always been the company’s core business. Gukan Medical Management’s one-stop solution encompasses business modules such as self-service kiosks, wall-mounted devices, mobile hospital platforms, and medical payment services. It provides routine functions including appointment registration, queue calling, billing, video-based health education, and pre- and post-consultation services, thereby alleviating hospital queue pressures while reducing patients’ costs for follow-up visits.

Currently, GuKan Medical Management has provided one-stop solutions to over 500 hospitals, including Hangzhou First People’s Hospital, Hangzhou Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, and Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital Affiliated to Zhejiang University. Its scale effect extends to municipal-level hospitals and community health centers in various districts of Hangzhou.

When discussing the reasons for joining DingTalk’s new healthcare ecosystem, Yang Jianjun pointed out that, at present, different vendors provide various segments of medical informatics services, creating data silos that hinder regional interconnectivity and interoperability. This poses particular challenges to advancing regional healthcare integration.

DingTalk’s new healthcare ecosystem seeks to advance hospital management informatization through a unified infrastructure. Service providers with diverse business specialties deliver scalable, productized services via a single entry point. By applying internet-centric thinking to the development of hospital management tools, the platform prioritizes an exceptional user experience and genuinely implements a people-oriented management philosophy, covering both basic hospital office applications and healthcare-specific industry applications.

Yang Jianjun candidly admitted that Gukan Medical Management took many detours in its attempts to explore new market growth points. Through trial and error, the company learned the critical importance of validating the business logic and value propositions of internet healthcare at the earliest stage. Since 2018, Gukan Medical Management has continuously invested in the DingTalk ecosystem and established benchmark hospitals. The rapid expansion of its business scale promptly validated the feasibility of its medical management services, reinforcing Yang Jianjun’s conviction that this sector should become the company’s key focus for the next phase of development.

Going forward, GuKan Medical Management will consolidate its regional hospital management informationization layout model and expand its business reach to broader regions. Currently, GuKan Medical Management is launching a new round of financing in the tens of millions, with the funds primarily allocated to team building, marketing and promotion, and product research and development.