When Opportunity Knocks: How Internet Hospitals Navigate Trends and Seize Growth — Insights from Wu Zhen Internet Hospital’s IPO Filing
On June 14, the grand finals of the 3rd Smart Healthcare Innovation Competition were held in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. One hundred innovative projects from across China competed in the finals, covering areas such as smart hospitals, “Internet + Healthcare,” clinical applications, medical consortium development, specialized care applications, tiered diagnosis and treatment, and artificial intelligence. Driven by technological innovation, a wave of transformation is sweeping through the healthcare industry. What trends and opportunities lie ahead for internet hospitals? Yang Jianchun, a professional judge on the review committee of the Smart Healthcare Innovation Competition, Vice President of WeDoctor, and Executive Dean of Wuzhen Internet Hospital, shared his insights on the development of internet hospitals amid the opportunities of the times.
Deputy Director of the Standardization Management Committee for Internet Hospitals, Chinese Society of Health Informatics and Medical Big Data,
Professional Judge, Review Committee of the Smart Healthcare Innovation Competition,
Yang Jianchun, Executive Dean of Wuzhen Internet Hospital
What Core Issues Should Smart Healthcare Innovation Address?
Yang Jianchun: To assess the value of an innovation, one should evaluate whether it makes valuable contributions to the industry. It must be capable of comprehensively transforming and optimizing production relations, thereby forging and refining new production chains within the sector.
From the perspective of internet-based healthcare, it plays a highly significant role in three aspects. First, regarding end-user demand, internet-based healthcare breaks through temporal and spatial constraints, facilitating the balanced distribution of medical resources so that even underdeveloped regions can access high-quality medical services—a key expectation for this model. Second, by leveraging internet technologies and methods, it promotes interconnectivity among medical resources at all levels, enabling data sharing. Third, it improves patients’ healthcare experience and reduces overall medical expenditures. The Wuzhen Internet Hospital was built precisely around these three pillars.
There were numerous internet hospital case studies presented on-site today. I have defined three criteria for internet hospitals: first, whether the technology genuinely aggregates and refines medical expertise; second, whether it enhances service efficiency within the healthcare industry; and third, whether it optimizes the patient experience for the general public. If an internet hospital company fails to establish true core value in these three areas, it will be unable to take root among the public and within the healthcare service system, nor will it generate genuine value.
What Breakthroughs and Innovations Has Wuzhen Internet Hospital Achieved?
Yang Jianchun: On December 7, 2015, the Wuzhen Internet Hospital was officially launched, pioneering a new model of “Internet+” healthcare and serving as a benchmark for smart healthcare across China. As the first true internet hospital in the country, it broke new ground by introducing integrated medical services such as online appointment scheduling, remote diagnosis and treatment, electronic prescriptions, and medication delivery.
In November 2017, leveraging internet and artificial intelligence technologies, the home-based medical service system built by WeDoctor around the “base + outlets + terminals” model was fully implemented on the Wuzhen Internet Hospital platform. This marked another upgrade for Wuzhen Internet Hospital, transforming it from an internet healthcare platform into an intelligent healthcare platform.
Wuzhen Internet Hospital deeply connects various healthcare supply-and-demand scenarios involving hospitals, physicians, patients, and the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. It provides medical institutions with a suite of cloud-based solutions—including cloud-enabled hospital portals, cloud-based physician consulting rooms, cloud-integrated medical consortia, and cloud-processed health insurance payment and settlement—thereby reducing operational burdens, enhancing business efficiency, and mitigating medical risks for healthcare providers.
It can be said that throughout the various stages of development in “Internet + Healthcare,” Wuzhen Internet Hospital has made significant innovative contributions to the industry and driven its rapid transformation. Innovation is a core DNA of technology companies, and WeDoctor has always been on the path of innovation.
How Many Stages Has the Development of Wuzhen Internet Hospital Gone Through? How Will It Develop in the Future?
Yang Jianchun: The first phase of WeDoctor was Guahao.com, with its primary services centered on digitizing the traditional outpatient processes of offline hospitals. This included online appointment registration, digital payment and settlement, and access to laboratory test reports. By facilitating human-computer data interaction through server-based infrastructure, we accumulated a substantial user base and hospital-related data during this stage. However, there was no clear profit model at that time. Many people currently have a simplistic understanding of internet hospitals, equating them merely with hospital informatization solutions. Strictly speaking, such solutions do not constitute true "internet" services, as the essence of the internet lies in sharing and interoperability.
In the second phase, we established an internet hospital. The Wuzhen Internet Hospital is China’s first internet hospital, enabling online diagnosis and treatment. WeDoctor evolved from providing back-end information technology services to becoming a licensed internet hospital with diagnostic and therapeutic qualifications. This breakthrough dissolved the boundaries of traditional hospitals, liberating physicians and medical facilities from the constraints of time, space, and physical location.
In the third phase, for internet hospitals to achieve large-scale development, breakthroughs, and replication, they must have support from medical insurance, with third-party payers covering the medical services provided by internet hospitals. Last year, WeDoctor proposed the “Three-Medical Linkage” strategy and began its implementation. The third stage of internet hospitals involves connecting healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. By decentralizing medical technology, addressing payment disparities, reducing circulation and transaction costs through centralized drug bidding, and forming a closed-loop service across the pharmaceutical industry chain, combined with medical insurance payments, internet medical services gain the potential for large-scale breakthroughs.
On June 12, ten government departments, including the National Health Commission, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the National Healthcare Security Administration, jointly issued the “Opinions on Promoting the Sustained, Healthy, and Regulated Development of Privately Run Medical Institutions.” The document requires that policies governing fees for internet-based diagnosis and treatment and their reimbursement through medical insurance be formulated and released by the end of September. What was once considered an exceedingly difficult challenge has now taken a historic step forward, signaling that the future of internet hospitals presents a tremendous opportunity.