Huimei Yijian Files IPO Prospectus: Powering Pharma Commercialization with AI and Big Data

In 2015, Mayo Clinic and Hillhouse Capital established a joint venture in China—Huimei Healthcare Group—which comprehensively introduced Mayo Clinic’s advanced knowledge, technology, management, and training systems across all levels, including hospitals/clinics, physicians/nurses, patients, and administrative staff. Subsequently, Huimei Healthcare established two subsidiaries: Huimei Extreme Healthcare and Huimei Technology. Huimei Extreme Healthcare is dedicated to providing value-added hospital management services to domestic medical institutions, such as management training, external exchanges, and continuing education for healthcare professionals, while also tailoring “integrated global healthcare solutions” for high-net-worth individuals served by banks, insurance companies, and corporations. Huimei Technology focuses on the independent research and development and clinical application of medical artificial intelligence. Both companies, particularly Huimei Technology, which has deeply cultivated the field of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), have become well-known in the industry, with VCBeat providing continuous coverage since 2015.

Within the healthcare industry chain, physicians, patients, and pharmaceutical companies are the three most critical stakeholders in this ecosystem. Huimei Technology and Huimei Jizhi primarily serve hospitals, physicians, and patients. With products for the physician and patient segments already in place, pharmaceutical enterprises represent another key strategic direction for Huimei’s industrial layout. Huimei’s third subsidiary, Huimei Yijian, was established in October 2017, completing Huimei’s comprehensive tripartite layout across physicians, patients, and pharmaceutical companies.

Huimei Yijian’s core business leverages a professional medical knowledge system and technical capabilities to provide pharmaceutical companies with big data management platforms, offer technological and data support for academic interactions between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, and deliver consulting services for interactions among pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and patients. Like Huimei Technology, Huimei Yijian empowers its clients through technology, enhancing efficiency by digitally transforming traditional business and management models.

Liu Ding, CEO of Huimei Yijian, stated in an interview with VCBeat: “Huimei Yijian’s entry point for pharmaceutical companies is leveraging big data and artificial intelligence to help them enhance the efficiency of their commercial operations.”

Specifically, the DMP (Data Management Platform) provided by Huimei Yijian aggregates various physician-patient data, including user (physician) behavioral information and digital interaction data between pharmaceutical companies and physicians. By leveraging data science to build user profiles, the platform guides pharmaceutical sales representatives in conducting academic promotion of drugs, thereby enabling digital marketing and enhancing marketing efficiency and effectiveness.

Liu Ding, CEO of Huimei Yijian

Liu Ding, CEO of Huimei Yijian, previously held positions at several renowned global service providers in the industry before joining the company. He served as Director of Technology Application and Business Transformation at IMS Health (now IQVIA), a leading industry consulting firm, and as Vice President for China at Veeva Systems. With nearly a decade of experience exploring the digital transformation of pharmaceutical marketing, Mr. Liu has collaborated with most top multinational pharmaceutical companies and prominent domestic pharmaceutical enterprises in China in this field.

For pharmaceutical companies, the challenge of digital transformation lies not in technology, but in integrating cross-disciplinary knowledge structures—such as artificial intelligence, marketing technology, and medicine. The demand for such interdisciplinary expertise often creates barriers in organizational structure, execution, and operations, which is one of the primary reasons why pharmaceutical companies struggle to achieve digital transformation solely through internal efforts. At Huimei Yijian, top industry talents have formed three specialized teams: software development, data and data science, and medicine and digitalization. This tripartite team structure is designed to break down traditional knowledge silos and genuinely drive the enterprise’s digital transformation.

Judging by the marketing development trends of any enterprise, marketing must inevitably be built upon a precise understanding of customers. For instance, when we make purchases on e-commerce platforms, these sites collect data to construct accurate user profiles—identifying whether a customer is a new mother or a middle-aged woman—and thereby recommend products tailored to their specific needs.

There is a significant gap between marketing in the pharmaceutical industry and traditional sectors; however, sales can still be guided by precise customer insights. Pharmaceutical representatives can be categorized into three types: those engaged in kickback-driven sales, relationship-driven sales, and academically driven sales. Contrary to national policies and inconsistent with universal values, kickback-driven and relationship-driven sales models are increasingly being prohibited by regulatory policies.

As cost pressures rise, new policies and regulations are continuously introduced, healthcare institutions undergo internal reforms, and the overall medical market becomes increasingly complex, certain traditional business models—particularly the conventional marketing approach centered on face-to-face visits by sales representatives—have faced significant challenges. Physicians have little time to accommodate in-person visits and are increasingly concerned about compliance risks.

Currently, the global pharmaceutical industry is undergoing significant technological transformation and evolution. There are corresponding digitalization demands on both the R&D and marketing fronts. While numerous digital tools have emerged in drug discovery, research and development, and clinical trials, the digitalization process in marketing has been relatively slower. There is a lack of effective tools to measure the efficiency of communication between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, as well as the effectiveness of information delivery and feedback. At present, physicians prefer digital methods for communication and learning, which offer convenience and compliance while fostering more relaxed interactions with enterprises. However, the use of digital tools for academic marketing by pharmaceutical companies is still in an exploratory phase, having yet to achieve a breakthrough, and no single model has been universally recognized as the optimal approach.

Amid the rapid advancements in targeted therapies and immuno-oncology, competitive advantage in the future can only be established by leveraging academic support to guide physicians’ prescribing practices through product-specific expertise, and by disseminating professional drug knowledge via academic exchanges and physician skills training.

The transition from relationship-based marketing to academic marketing requires increasingly precise cognition and understanding of users.

What information does the DMP platform collect from physicians? Non-private data such as physicians’ online lightweight consultation records, patient dialogues, published papers, participation in clinical trials and medical conferences, interests in medical devices and pharmaceuticals, and preferred brands are decomposed into various tags using natural language processing techniques. Meanwhile, by implementing tracking technologies across professional medical websites, pharmaceutical company websites, and even offline communication channels between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, it is possible to capture users’ areas of interest and trending topics.

By aggregating these fragmented data points and leveraging various machine learning algorithms for information synthesis, it is possible to construct a comprehensive profile of physicians. This profile provides insights into their professional competence, disease perception, clinical treatment approaches, and attitudes toward innovative therapies. Pharmaceutical companies can gain a clear understanding of physicians’ backgrounds and needs through this information, thereby optimizing their marketing strategies. Such strategies may include reinforcing specific knowledge areas, defining topics for academic promotion, and guiding medical representatives’ communication scripts, which will undoubtedly enhance the success rate of interactions between representatives and physicians.

For physicians, the services provided by Huimei Yijian offer access to advanced therapeutic options and drug information, thereby enhancing their clinical practice capabilities. For pharmaceutical companies, these services facilitate a deeper understanding of their user base, strengthen regional influence, and improve marketing efficiency. In alignment with national policy requirements, pharmaceutical companies’ marketing and medical affairs departments are shifting from incentive-driven sales models to delivering academic content, addressing physicians’ scholarly inquiries, and improving prescribing practices. This transition is highly consistent with Huimei’s mission to leverage technological solutions and introduce Mayo Clinic’s advanced medical knowledge and clinical expertise to elevate the level of clinical practice among physicians in China.

Following the separation of prescribing and dispensing, it is worth considering how to leverage existing channels to influence retail terminals. The emergence of Huimei Yijian provides pharmaceutical companies with a new digital tool, enabling more precise control over sales strategies and helping them take another step forward in their digital transformation.

As previously mentioned, the product positioning of Huimei’s three companies targets physicians, patients, and pharmaceutical companies; however, this merely categorizes the end users of their products. Healthcare scenarios are inherently interconnected and cannot be simply segmented. Therefore, the digital marketing solutions provided by Huimei Yijian to pharmaceutical enterprises also cater to physicians and patients as end users.

The Mayo Clinic knowledge base contains numerous standard clinical practice guidelines in the medical field, and its richly illustrated content is highly suitable for pharmaceutical companies to use in physician and patient education. By localizing Mayo Clinic’s guidelines and patient education materials, Huimei Yijian also provides pharmaceutical companies with educational support for primary care physicians, as well as content support for patient education initiatives within patient services and chronic disease management programs.

Huimei Healthcare serves domestic users by introducing top-tier medical resources and knowledge systems from the Mayo Clinic. Leveraging authoritative medical support from the Mayo Clinic, Huimei Yijian integrates data science with information technology to provide pharmaceutical companies with innovative digital products and services. This strategic direction aligns closely with the transformation trends of pharmaceutical enterprises in the Chinese market. Consequently, shortly after its launch, Huimei Yijian established partnerships with numerous leading pharmaceutical companies. Examples include utilizing Huimei Yijian’s profiling system to guide Key Opinion Leader (KOL) management within medical affairs departments, optimizing the operation of medical websites through channel tracking points, and employing intelligent analytics to guide medical representatives in customer visits. These initiatives bring a fresh impetus to advancing genuine digital transformation for major pharmaceutical companies operating in China’s unique market amidst today’s rapidly changing era.

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