Ping An Good Doctor Partners with Over 100 Tier-3A Hospitals Nationwide to Co-Build 'Smart Hospitals' Through Digital Empowerment

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that on October 15, Ping An Good Doctor (01833.HK), China’s leading one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform, announced that it had signed cooperation agreements with more than 100 Grade A tertiary hospitals across China, including the PLA No. 303 Hospital, Qingdao Eye Hospital, the First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, and the Third Affiliated Hospital of Southern Medical University. Leveraging its AI-driven medical technology capabilities, Ping An Good Doctor is working with these partner hospitals to jointly build comprehensive “Smart Hospitals.” Currently, the platform serves over 1 million outpatient users per day, effectively reducing burdens for hospitals, physicians, patients, and the government.

During the collaboration, Ping An Good Doctor’s groundbreaking intelligent auxiliary consultation system, “AI Doctor,” was fully integrated with hospital Hospital Information Systems (HIS), mobile apps, and WeChat official accounts. After patients scan a QR code to access the “AI Doctor” system, their chief complaints, current medical history, past medical history, medication history, allergy history, and other information are intelligently collected through simple and convenient human-computer interaction and automatically written into the hospital’s HIS. During consultations, physicians can review patients’ structured medical records in advance and conduct targeted follow-up inquiries. This not only saves time spent on repetitive questioning but also standardizes the consultation workflow, preventing the omission of critical information. Meanwhile, physicians are relieved from burdensome manual data entry, significantly reducing their workload and effectively improving both the efficiency and accuracy of consultations.

Currently, the “AI Doctor,” powered by a big data repository of up to 300 million online medical consultations, can cover more than 2,000 common diseases and provide instant answers to tens of thousands of medical and health-related questions. Hospitals that have integrated the “AI Doctor” have been able to multiply their efficiency and accuracy in patient intake across the entire care continuum—pre-consultation, during consultation, and post-consultation—while reducing operational costs. Meanwhile, the “AI Doctor” also provides hospitals with structured electronic medical record (EMR) management, ensuring more comprehensive patient information, more coherent medical diagnoses, and smarter follow-up case management, thereby comprehensively enhancing their level of informatization.

Guo Zhen, Deputy Director of Qingdao Eye Hospital, stated, “In the past, physicians had to manually enter information such as each patient’s chief complaint, history of present illness, and past medical history into the electronic medical record system during consultations, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive. With ‘AI Doctor’ collecting patient information prior to the consultation, physicians now have more time to engage in in-depth communication with patients, thereby improving outpatient efficiency and enhancing the patient care experience.”

Jin Danian, Director of the Information Department at the 303rd Hospital of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, stated that Ping An Good Doctor’s “AI Doctor” directly integrates with hospital HIS systems and outpatient electronic medical records, reducing physicians’ data entry workload and enhancing patients’ healthcare experience. Meanwhile, it provides robust support to hospitals in standardizing consultation pathways and medical practices.

However, many hospitals in China, in the process of building smart healthcare systems, are not only facing technical challenges such as high costs of informatization transformation, patient electronic medical record data, and insufficient hospital data management capabilities; but also confronting practical issues such as cross-hospital data integration, online and offline service integration, and optimization of medical service processes.

Addressing key pain points, Ping An Good Doctor and its partner hospitals have jointly developed a comprehensive solution for the digital transformation of hospitals. This solution effectively integrates Ping An Good Doctor’s globally leading AI healthcare technologies and mobile internet capabilities with hospital service capacities, thereby enhancing connectivity among hospitals, physicians, and patients, improving hospital service efficiency, alleviating bottlenecks in the supply of medical resources, reducing burdens on hospitals, physicians, patients, and the government, and accelerating the realization of the government’s “Healthy China” strategy.

A representative from Ping An Good Doctor stated that in the first half of the year, the company filed 26 patent applications related to its AI research and development. Benefiting from the continuous optimization of its AI intelligent engine, the service capabilities of its AI technology have been steadily enhanced, with applications expanding to more offline scenarios such as hospitals, pharmacies, communities, and enterprises. Looking ahead, Ping An Good Doctor will continue to strengthen its AI R&D efforts to improve the accuracy and applicability of AI in medical applications. It will also deepen collaboration with partners, including physical hospitals and government departments, to jointly create a multi-stakeholder, sustainable “Smart Hospital” construction and management model, thereby delivering greater social value.

Ping An Good Doctor is China’s leading one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform, committed 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 amassed 228 million registered users, with 48.6 million monthly active users at the period’s end, making it the most widely used mobile healthcare application in China. Ping An Good Doctor employs an in-house medical team of over 1,000 professionals and has contracted 4,550 external renowned physicians (all holding the title of associate chief physician or higher at Grade A tertiary hospitals). Empowered by AI technology, the platform provides 24/7 online consultations, offering users auxiliary diagnosis, rehabilitation guidance, and medication recommendations. It collaborates with more than 3,100 offline hospitals (including over 1,200 Grade A tertiary hospitals) to facilitate subsequent triage and referrals, 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 aesthetics facilities, 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 visits.

In April 2015, the “Ping An Good Doctor” app was officially launched. In May 2016, Ping An Good Doctor completed a USD 500 million Series A financing round. In December 2017, it received a USD 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 with the stock code 1833.HK, known as the world’s first internet healthcare stock. The cornerstone investors in its initial public offering included BlackRock, Capital Group, Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Swiss Re, and CP Group.