Chunyu Doctor's Internet-Plus Smart Healthcare Pathway: Patient-Centered Approach to Building a New Medical Service Ecosystem
By Luo Mei, Nie Guanghong
Since its establishment in 2011, Chunyu Doctor has been committed to building China’s leading mobile health technology and service platform. As the first to introduce the concept of mobile health to China, it is a pioneer in internet healthcare and has weathered the industry’s fluctuations and turbulence.
After seven years of development, Chunyu has accumulated 120 million users and over 500,000 doctors. Its online consultation service was the first to achieve commercialization, with the current overall user payment rate exceeding 70%.
Seven years have passed. What are Spring Rain Doctor’s current perspectives on “Internet Plus” smart healthcare, a topic of intense industry debate? Recently, VCBeat interviewed Mr. Zeng Boyi, Chairman and Co-founder of Spring Rain Doctor.
In the interview, Zeng Boyi introduced Chunyu Doctor’s service philosophy and, drawing on the concept of internet-based medical services, interpreted Chunyu Doctor’s patient-centered practices in “Internet+” smart healthcare services.
The core philosophy of internet companies is user-centricity, while the fundamental principle of healthcare is patient-centricity; these two concepts are essentially aligned. In the healthcare industry, the term “users” refers not only to patients but also to a large population of healthy individuals, as the scope extends beyond disease treatment to include health management. However, medical institutions tend to focus more on the concept of “patients,” i.e., individuals requiring medical treatment.
The concept of patient-centered care emerged in the United States in the 1950s. In the 1980s, several standards for patient-centered services were proposed, including access to care, respect for patients’ values and preferences, communication and patient education, and emotional and psychological support.
The patient-centered philosophy remains relevant and continues to be highly advocated by the Western medical community. In the current era of “Internet Plus” smart healthcare, whether for healthcare service providers or enterprises, ultimate implementation will occur in application scenarios, with users remaining the core focus.
From a policy perspective, patient-centered care is also a key direction of healthcare reform. Many healthcare reform documents issued in China include phrases such as “patient-centered,” “strengthening humanistic care,” and “people-oriented.” All these objectives aim to meet the people’s growing demands for medical and health services.
From the hospital’s perspective, there are two options: either improve medical efficiency or enhance the quality and safety of medical care. However, Zeng Boyi emphasizes that a patient-centered approach should primarily focus on the latter. The well-known iron triangle of healthcare posits that quality, accessibility, and cost cannot all be optimized simultaneously; one must inevitably be compromised.
From the patient’s perspective, the current healthcare service experience is far from satisfactory. Traditional hospitals face several challenges, including high operational costs, service quality that fails to meet patient needs, weak doctor-patient relationships, short service cycles, and fragmented care delivery.
Mobile internet is a key driver in transforming the status quo and realizing the patient-centered care model. Since its inception, Chunyu Doctor has conducted extensive online practices, demonstrating that leveraging the internet can significantly enhance users’ experience in addressing various health issues. New tools also enable doctors and patients to establish more long-term relationships, allowing patients to receive better care without increasing medical costs.
Zeng Boyi summarized some key milestones in the development of Chunyu Yisheng over the past few years:
In 2011, Chunyu began launching its light consultation service, leveraging mobile internet and smartphones to facilitate rapid and convenient communication between patients and physicians. From its initial app-based product to the current multi-channel ecosystem encompassing mobile apps, web platforms, WeChat interfaces, and open platforms, mobile consultation services have evolved into a large-scale online interactive and service network.
In 2014, Air Hospital was launched, enabling physicians to set prices for their services online and market them directly to internet users.
Since 2015, we have been exploring the private physician model. Starting with one-on-one consultations between physicians and patients, this model aims to establish long-term, strong relationships between doctors and patients;
Launched in 2016, the Open Consultation Platform empowers other online digital health service platforms with Chunyu Doctor’s consultation capabilities. Currently, more than 500 partners have integrated with the platform, including many major traffic portals across the Chinese internet—such as Baidu, Alipay, BabyTree, and various insurance companies—all leveraging Chunyu Doctor to serve their platform patients.
Online consultation platforms are designed to serve users; therefore, Chunyu Yisheng has established specific service standards for its online consultations. Zeng Baiyi summarized these as the “4A Service Standards,” aiming to help Chunyu define user needs, determine how to deliver corresponding services, and build trust between doctors and patients.
The first “A” stands for Available, meaning rapid response within three minutes, available 24/7. The second “A” is Affable, referring to a friendly and approachable demeanor, which reflects high standards for physicians’ online service attitude. Chunyu Doctor also employs various incentive mechanisms to encourage physicians to provide better services to users. Zeng Baiyi stated that the overall service satisfaction rate of Chunyu Doctor exceeds 97%. The third “A” is Able, indicating comprehensive, personalized, and scenario-based service capabilities across all medical specialties. Physicians on the Chunyu platform are generally mid- to senior-level professionals; more than 24% hold associate senior titles or above, and over 50% are from tertiary Grade A hospitals, covering all medical specialties—thus ensuring comprehensive specialty service capability. Chunyu also recommends different physicians based on specific user scenarios to ensure that patients receive appropriate and targeted medical consultations online. The fourth “A” is Affordable, representing an efficient sharing economy with affordable pricing.
Beyond online consultations, Chunyu Doctor has established an internet-based tiered diagnosis and treatment system to optimize the allocation of medical resources. In building this tiered service framework, Chunyu Doctor adheres to the overarching principles of “people-oriented approach, voluntary public participation, urban-rural coordination, and institutional innovation.” By forging a new path, it shifts the focus from resource-centric to user-centric, addressing users’ needs through a tiered approach.
Chunyu Doctor aims to establish initial trust with users acquired through various traffic channels after their consultation experiences, and then build family doctor relationships to secure long-term trust. Based on this long-term trust, tiered diagnosis and treatment services are provided to users. For minor health issues, solutions can be offered through health education and popular science content; for users with higher service expectations, online consultation services are recommended. The next step involves community clinics, followed by hospitals as the last resort. This entire process facilitates the rational allocation of medical resources.
In 2017, Chunyu Doctor began to build its family doctor service. Zeng Boyi stated that Chunyu aims to create a product based on trust for full lifecycle user management.
Zeng Boyi provided us with a detailed interpretation of Spring Rain Doctor’s family doctor service practices.
In recent years, the government has vigorously promoted the signing of family doctor contracts, encouraged social capital to enter the field of family doctor services, and supported the provision of family doctor contract management services via the internet. However, the most significant issue remains “signing without engagement,” wherein users do not genuinely receive services, resulting in a low overall sense of service acquisition.
Chunyu Doctor aims to provide foundational medical care on a broad scale by empowering basic healthcare service providers, including family doctors, community health service stations, and community hospitals.
Chunyu Doctor’s family physician service was launched at the end of 2017, aiming to deliver tangible, perceptible services to users via the internet. The entire service process is centered around users and their families, with health consultants communicating directly with them, while each health consultant is supported by a dedicated family physician.
Health advisors do not prescribe medications or make diagnoses; they serve solely as connectors. They provide medical education and chronic disease management, offer recommendations to support users’ healthcare decision-making, and help users develop a better understanding of their own conditions while gathering more detailed information from them.
Zeng Boyi told us that the services provided by health consultants are largely consistent with the basic services that family doctors, as advocated by the National Health Commission, should deliver. These include establishing health records for individuals and families, conducting preliminary consultations, interpreting medical reports, managing chronic diseases, and providing health education. When users actually fall ill, health consultants can assist them in making healthcare decisions and help them find suitable hospitals through green channels.
Provide rehabilitation guidance via the internet when patients enter the post-diagnosis rehabilitation phase.
Health advisors are individuals with medical knowledge, but they are not doctors in the true sense. Zeng Boyi explained that this is because China currently has an insufficient number of family physicians, and the public remains skeptical about their professional competence. If we were to insist on relying solely on family physicians to provide diagnostic and treatment services, the supply of resources would be far from adequate. Chunyu Doctor’s strategy is to first establish a strong bond with users through health advisors.
Zeng Boyi summarized the key features of Chunyu Doctor’s family physician services:
1. Engage with users through front-end health consultants to build trust and demonstrate humanistic care in medical services.
2. In terms of efficiency, emphasis is placed on leveraging AI-assisted diagnosis to enhance the professional competence and management capabilities of health consultants, who are also supported by a comprehensive CRM system to document the unique conditions of each patient.
3. Family doctor services are supported by Chunyu’s physician resource pool; when health consultants encounter complex cases, they can further engage specialists to provide diagnosis and treatment for users.
After more than a year of operating its family doctor service, Chunyu Doctor has established a health consultant team comprising dozens of members. The platform has cumulatively provided online services to over 30,000 families, with more than 200,000 users joining Chunyu’s Family Health Groups. On average, each family generates 3.1 medical consultations per month, with pediatric care being the most prominent need. Notably, over 45% of subscribed families renewed their service upon expiration.
Zeng Boyi stated that what moved him most was that Chunyu has established long-term trust with users through its family doctor product. Many users even seek advice from health consultants when dealing with trivial matters in their daily lives. Built on this foundation of trust, the business model for family doctor services extends beyond upfront payments, offering numerous opportunities for backend monetization in the later stages.
Currently, Chunyu Doctor is also exploring collaborations with municipal-level governments and health commissions to promote the family doctor model in offline settings.
Two years ago, Chunyu Yisheng began its foray into offline services by partnering with brick-and-mortar medical institutions to integrate online and offline care. The aim was to ensure that the user-centric philosophy inherent in internet thinking would genuinely influence hospitals and tangibly improve the overall patient experience.
Chunyu Doctor has been collaborating with various hospitals and medical institutions to build internet hospitals. Last year, it reached partnerships with several large hospitals, and this year it has worked with private hospitals in Beijing, Hebei, Chongqing, Guizhou, and Yunnan. The overall consultation volume and the number of online patients have begun to show positive results.
Zeng Boyi shared two key insights from collaborating with hospitals. He stated that to achieve effective implementation, it is essential to first select hospitals with a relatively similar patient age demographic, such as women’s and children’s hospitals, which tend to have higher user engagement. Secondly, hospitals with a large proportion of non-local patients are preferable, as internet-based diagnosis and treatment enhance patients’ sense of benefit and drive higher utilization rates.
Taking Hebei Yanda Hospital as an example, Chunyu Doctor collaborated with Yanda Hospital to establish the Yanda Internet Diagnosis and Treatment Platform. In addition to providing both in-hospital and out-of-hospital services, the platform offers features such as appointment registration, consultation fee payment, and online consultations. Chunyu has also developed a hypertension service management system specifically for managing patients with hypertension. At Hebei Yanda Hospital, the core functions of the internet diagnosis and treatment platform are used hundreds of times per day, accounting for approximately 20% of the hospital’s total outpatient volume.
Zeng Boyi stated that the core of collaborating with physical medical institutions lies in providing them with physician management, incentive mechanisms, and user operations, thereby expanding their patient reach. Chunyu’s core competency is its operational capability; only with proven cases and templates can other hospitals be convinced. Therefore, Chunyu has adopted an in-depth engagement strategy to ultimately build a nationwide Internet-plus-hospital service network.
Zeng Boyi stated that a key concern for many hospitals is whether leveraging the internet to bring patients online can truly deliver better services to patients and help hospitals increase their revenue.
Therefore, for the implementation of internet hospitals, the first step is to advance informatization infrastructure. The second step is to onboard all physicians from partner physical hospitals onto the platform, provide them with auxiliary tools, and establish a comprehensive management mechanism. The final step is to deploy an operations team for offline implementation, including training physicians on how to use the software and mobile applications.
Chunyu Doctor currently operates a standalone internet hospital; however, the greatest strength of the internet lies in long-distance connectivity. The company is continuously improving its platform to provide more comprehensive services to hospitals.
Zeng Boyi believes that the overall healthcare market is fragmented, with no single company able to capture 100% of the market.