Tasly and Tencent Forge Strategic Partnership to Advance Smart Healthcare Ecosystem

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) learned on June 6 that Tasly Holding Group Co., Ltd. (“Tasly”) and Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems Company Limited (“Tencent”) have signed a strategic cooperation agreement to jointly advance the development of smart healthcare systems. The two parties will collaborate on innovating, establishing, and implementing models and solutions for smart pharmaceutical manufacturing, smart medical insurance, smart healthcare, smart chronic disease management, smart central city pharmacies, and smart traceability. By co-building platforms and engaging in joint operations, they aim to cooperate in areas such as big data analytics in pharmaceuticals, separation of prescribing and dispensing, decentralization of medical resources to grassroots levels, precision chronic disease management, rational control of medical insurance costs, and precise patient monitoring.

Tasly and Tencent Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement

Yan Kaijing, Executive Chairman of the Board of Tasly Group, signed strategic cooperation agreements with Tencent and the Jinnan District People’s Government on behalf of Tasly, covering the “Internet + Smart Manufacturing and Smart Healthcare” and “Internet + Medical Health” initiatives. Yan Xijun, Chairman of the Board of Tasly Holding Group, and Chen Guangyu, Vice President of Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems Co., Ltd., among other leaders, attended the signing ceremony. Additionally, Hu Xiaoyi, President of the China Society of Social Insurance and former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security; Meng Zhaoxi, Vice President of the China Society of Social Insurance and former Director of the Social Insurance Center under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security; Gao Lianhuan, Deputy Director of the Tianjin Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau; and Yu Ruijun, Executive Deputy District Mayor of Jinnan District, Tianjin, also attended the event. The participants engaged in discussions on multiple aspects, including the development directions, innovation trends, implementation strategies, and government regulation of smart healthcare, smart health management, and smart medical insurance.

On June 4, during an inspection tour in Yinchuan City, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Premier Li Keqiang pointed out that leveraging “Internet Plus” holds tremendous potential to improve key areas of public welfare. In accordance with the deployments of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, efforts should be made to deeply advance the “Internet Plus” action plan, enabling residents in grassroots communities and impoverished regions—where it is currently difficult to directly allocate more high-quality resources—to access better public services more conveniently, thereby promoting equity. The Premier’s instructions have provided stronger guidance for the implementation of the “Opinions on Promoting the Development of ‘Internet Plus Healthcare’” (hereinafter referred to as the “Opinions”) issued by the General Office of the State Council on April 28, 2018.

The “Opinions” encourage medical institutions to leverage information technologies such as the Internet to expand the scope and content of medical services, and to establish an integrated online-offline healthcare service model covering pre-diagnosis, during-diagnosis, and post-diagnosis stages. Medical institutions are permitted to develop internet hospitals, utilizing internet technologies to provide safe and appropriate medical services, including online follow-up consultations for certain common and chronic diseases. Meanwhile, the “Opinions” also encourage upper-level medical institutions within medical consortia to employ artificial intelligence and other technological means to provide remote consultation, remote electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis, and remote imaging diagnosis services to grassroots-level facilities. Efforts will be accelerated to promote the integration and interoperability of medical security information systems, achieving data connectivity and sharing between medical security departments and relevant agencies. Intelligent auditing and real-time monitoring of medical insurance will be vigorously implemented, with rules related to clinical pathways, rational drug use, and payment policies embedded into hospital information systems to strictly regulate medical practices and expenses.

Tasly will leverage the infrastructure of “Tencent WeChat Smart Hospital” to jointly explore with Tencent the geographic expansion of chronic disease health management services based on this platform. The signed project, Juzhi Chronic Disease Health Management Co., Ltd., represents a key operational component of the collaboration between Tasly and Tencent in the “Smart Healthcare” sector. Moving forward, it will fully capitalize on Tencent’s technological advantages in big data analytics, patient engagement, real-name authentication, and security assurance, thereby expanding the pharmaceutical and healthcare services industry (covering related fields such as pharmaceuticals, traditional Chinese medicinal materials, medical insurance, medical care, chronic disease management, pharmaceutical retail, and health big data).

Juzhi Chronic Disease Health Management Co., Ltd. is an internally incubated project of Tasly since 2013. It participated in undertaking the “Innovative Medical Insurance Convenience and Benefit Project for Home Delivery of Medications to Outpatients with Special Chronic Diseases (Diabetes)” in Tianjin, taking the lead in launching online medical insurance settlement and home medication delivery services. Through gradual iterative upgrades, the company has now fully built a digital health platform for chronic disease management centered on “integration with healthcare institutions’ Hospital Information Systems (HIS), intelligent medical insurance cost control, precise drug regulation, and chronic disease management both within and outside hospitals,” thereby addressing challenges such as difficult access to medical care, medication pickup, and medical insurance cost containment. Through precise drug regulation, it ensures the security of social insurance funds; meanwhile, in coordination with the National Health and Family Planning Commission and healthcare institutions, it promotes the implementation of “separation of prescribing and dispensing” and “downward redistribution of medical resources,” assists grassroots medical institutions in providing “family doctor” contracted services, supports follow-up visits, and increases contract signing rates.

Tencent’s smart healthcare business, which includes WeChat Smart Hospitals and Miying (Shadow Detection), spans multiple domains such as payment model innovation, chronic disease management, and artificial intelligence. Tasly, a deep-rooted player in the big health industry driven by both industrial operations and capital investment, focuses in the smart healthcare sector on information connectivity and innovation-enabling targets, particularly remote imaging and patient-side service management within medical informatization, as well as the acquisition and processing of medical big data. Emphasizing both internal incubation and external acquisitions, Tasly has also made strategic investments in the internet healthcare and medical big data sectors, including Chengdu Shulian Yikang, a platform for controlling healthcare costs using medical insurance big data, and Yinggu Technology, a provider of cloud-based medical image processing, analysis engines, and AI tool services.

Building on this solid foundation of high-quality collaboration and project implementation, and leveraging the broad development prospects in the “Internet + Healthcare” sector, Tasly and Tencent will further explore business opportunities in smart R&D, smart manufacturing, and smart marketing management based on big data. Aligning with the direction of AI-driven medicine, they will jointly establish a full-process traceability system and model covering every stage from the cultivation and processing of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbs to distribution, marketing, and patient purchase.

Source: Tasly Capital