Ping An Good Doctor Launches China's First Commercial AI-Powered 'One-Minute Clinic' in Wuzhen, Building a One-Hour Healthcare Service Circle

On November 6, Ping An Good Doctor (01833.HK) announced the official launch of its “One-Minute Clinic,” the first commercially operated unmanned clinic in China, at the Wuzhen Scenic Area. The clinic will provide rapid and convenient one-stop healthcare services to nearby residents, tourists, and attendees of the World Internet Conference.

The “One-Minute Clinic” comprises two core functional modules: the “Private Consultation Room” and the “Smart Medicine Cabinet.” Patients need only sit in the Private Consultation Room to engage in voice consultations with cloud-based physicians. By describing their symptoms and utilizing on-site diagnostic equipment, they can receive preliminary diagnostic recommendations. Upon completion of the consultation, patients may follow the physician’s advice to pay for and collect medications directly from the adjacent Smart Medicine Cabinet. Currently, the One-Minute Clinic stocks over 100 common medications. For medicines not available on-site, users can purchase them online via the Ping An Good Doctor app, with nearby partner pharmacies providing “one-hour medication delivery” services.

A representative from Ping An Good Doctor introduced that, by leveraging cutting-edge intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and internet-based telemedicine, and integrating various smart health examination devices, the “One-Minute Clinic” provides users with self-service medical and healthcare services, including consultation, rehabilitation guidance, medication advice, and paid medication purchases, significantly reducing the time patients spend seeking medical care. During its one-week trial operation in the Wuzhen Scenic Area, the “One-Minute Clinic” has averaged nearly 100 consultations per day.

In the future, Ping An Good Doctor’s “One-Minute Clinic” will be widely deployed across public service venues such as pharmacies, communities, enterprises, schools, tourist attractions, shopping malls, and highway service areas. By leveraging its offline partnerships with more than 3,100 hospitals and over 60,000 primary care clinics, Ping An Good Doctor aims to create a one-kilometer medical service circle in urban areas, rapidly meeting residents’ immediate healthcare needs and empowering the development of healthy cities. It is expected that by the end of 2018, more than 1,000 “One-Minute Clinics” will be operational nationwide.

No registration or queuing required; consultations and prescriptions for chronic and common diseases can be completed within minutes. This 3-square-meter “One-Minute Clinic” is powered by advanced AI technology. During the consultation, patients are first attended to by Ping An Good Doctor’s AI product, “AI Doctor,” which interacts with them via voice, text, and images, guides them to accurately describe their symptoms, generates structured medical histories, and provides intelligent diagnostic recommendations for reference by specialist physicians in the backend. After the physician conducts a further evaluation, “AI Doctor” can generate smart prescriptions based on the doctor’s diagnostic input, thereby enabling an end-to-end intelligent consultation process and improving efficiency.

A representative from Ping An Good Doctor stated that “AI Doctor” was developed by an AI team comprising more than 200 world-leading artificial intelligence experts and has been trained and enhanced using over 300 million consultation and inquiry records from Ping An Good Doctor. Currently, “AI Doctor” covers more than 2,000 common diseases, provides instant responses to tens of thousands of medical and health-related questions, and achieves globally leading accuracy in assisting clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Once the “AI Doctor” completes its tasks, specialist physicians on the backend will conduct targeted follow-up consultations based on the structured patient medical records generated by the “AI Doctor,” review its diagnostic recommendations, and provide patients with greater humanistic care. Currently, Ping An Good Doctor has recruited a large number of outstanding physicians from Grade A tertiary hospitals, with its in-house medical team exceeding 1,000 members and nearly 5,000 externally contracted renowned specialists.

The combination of experienced, highly skilled physicians and globally leading cutting-edge AI technology ensures the accuracy and safety of the online consultation process at “One-Minute Clinic.”

Overcrowded Grade-A tertiary hospitals are a vivid reflection of the current difficulty in accessing medical care in China, and Ping An Good Doctor’s “One-Minute Clinic” is poised to become a powerful tool for alleviating this “healthcare access dilemma.”

Data from Frost & Sullivan, a third-party research firm, shows that in 2016, Chinese patients spent an average of about three hours per medical visit, including travel and waiting time, while the actual time spent receiving a physician’s diagnosis averaged only eight minutes. The poor healthcare experience has left patients deeply dissatisfied. Even for common ailments such as colds and headaches, it is not uncommon to spend several hours queuing to register.

If people could address their healthcare needs for common and chronic diseases at their workplaces, residential community entrances, or roadside locations, it would help alleviate the current overcrowding in hospitals. Ping An Good Doctor’s “One-Minute Clinic” represents a novel attempt to leverage AI-driven medical technology to ease the difficulty of accessing healthcare services. Currently, the “One-Minute Clinic” has been piloted across multiple corporate communities, including Industrial Bank, China Unicom, Bilibili, Evergrande Health Valley, and Country Garden, achieving promising results.

“From the current perspective, public service venues and large enterprises have the most urgent demand for ‘One-Minute Clinics,’” said a representative from Ping An Good Doctor. “Deploying ‘One-Minute Clinics’ in high-traffic areas such as shopping malls and tourist attractions can replace traditional infirmaries (staffed with two doctors and two nurses), significantly reducing annual medical labor costs while making it more convenient for patients to seek medical care and purchase medications, thereby saving time. Meanwhile, for users of Ping An Pension Insurance, ‘One-Minute Clinics’ already support direct billing with commercial insurance; users can conveniently and quickly pay for services at these clinics using their Ping An Pension Insurance health cards.”

Ping An Good Doctor is China’s leading one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform, dedicated to providing every family with a family doctor, every individual with an electronic health record, and every person with a personalized health management plan through its “mobile healthcare + AI” model. Currently, Ping An Good Doctor has established key business segments including family doctor services, consumer healthcare, the health mall, health management, and health engagement.

As of the end of June 2018, Ping An Good Doctor had accumulated 228 million registered users, with 48.6 million monthly active users at the period-end, making it the mobile health application with the highest coverage in China. Ping An Good Doctor has established an in-house medical team of over 1,000 professionals and contracted with 4,650 external renowned physicians (all holding the title of associate chief physician or above at Tier-3 Grade-A hospitals). Empowered by AI technology, it provides users with auxiliary diagnosis, rehabilitation guidance, and medication recommendations through 24/7 online consultations. Additionally, it collaborates with more than 3,100 offline hospitals (including over 1,200 Tier-3 Grade-A hospitals) to deliver subsequent triage and referral services, as well as initial offline consultations and follow-up visits.

Meanwhile, Ping An Good Doctor covers more than 2,000 health institutions, including physical examination centers, dental clinics, and medical aesthetic institutions, as well as over 10,000 pharmacies, forming a closed-loop service model that integrates online consultations with online medication purchases, and online consultations with offline medical care.

In April 2015, the “Ping An Good Doctor” app was officially launched. In May 2016, Ping An Good Doctor completed a $500 million Series A financing round. In December 2017, it secured a $400 million Pre-IPO investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, under Masayoshi Son. On May 4, 2018, Ping An Good Doctor was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code 1833.HK, becoming known as the world’s first publicly traded internet healthcare company. The cornerstone investors in its initial public offering included BlackRock, Capital Group, GIC (Government of Singapore Investment Corporation), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Khazanah Nasional Berhad (Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund), Swiss Re, and Thailand’s CP Group.