Zhuojian Technology, Overlooked Tencent-Backed Digital Health Firm, Files for IPO with Annual Revenue Projected to Exceed RMB 200 Million
Wei Jianfeng, Founder of Zhuojian Technology
On March 29, VCBeat released“Leveraging the New Healthcare Reform, Tencent Invests Over $500 Million in Five Medical Companies in Three Years, with This One Being the Most Easily Overlooked”article has garnered widespread attention.
The article mentions Zhuojian Technology, the internet healthcare company that is most easily overlooked by the outside world among the five major healthcare enterprises invested in by Tencent.
Why is Zhuojian the Most Easily Overlooked?
To this end, VCBeat promptly contacted Dr. Wei Jianfeng, founder of Zhuojian Technology, seeking to further interpret this core enterprise in Tencent’s strategic layout for the healthcare industry and demystify its enigmatic aura.
Aligning with the national direction of healthcare reform and deeply integrating into core medical operations, Zhuojian Technology has consistently positioned itself as “providing internet-based solutions for large and medium-sized hospitals.” Dr. Wei Jianfeng summarized the company’s product portfolio as “professional, comprehensive, and in-depth.”
Medical practices and healthcare institutions each follow their own distinct patterns; only those immersed in the field can truly sense the industry’s pulse and stay abreast of healthcare reform developments.
When asked why he transitioned from being a physician to an entrepreneur, Wei Jianfeng said, “It’s simply practicing medicine in a different way. A physician derives satisfaction from curing patients, whereas an entrepreneur finds fulfillment in helping hospitals and physicians enhance their diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities.”
“Having once served as a physician, I have an in-depth understanding of which aspects of medical practice and hospital operations require optimization, and how to achieve it.” This is Wei Jianfeng’s competitive edge, as well as that of Zhuojian Technology.
It is precisely for this reason that Zhuojian maintains a team structure in which medical professionals account for 10% of the total workforce. This approach enables the company to gain deep insights into the characteristics and pain points of the healthcare industry, ensuring its products address the core needs of medical services and healthcare institutions. By comprehensively serving hospitals, physicians, and patients, Zhuojian drives improvements and transformations in the optimization of medical services and processes.
According to Wei Jianfeng, Zhuojian boasts a rich product portfolio, with each product line built upon in-depth services for hospitals. Taking its Internet Hospital solution as an example, Zhuojian is deeply rooted in medical institutions themselves. By optimizing the output of four key medical resources—physicians, nurses, medical technologists, and pharmacists—from within the hospital, Zhuojian’s Internet Hospital not only integrates medical information to meet consumer-facing (To C) needs such as appointment registration, report retrieval, and intelligent triage, but also serves the allocation of medical service resources both inside and outside medical institutions. It establishes an integrated system covering payment settlement, diagnostic tests and examinations, medication dispensing, and value-added insurance services, thereby maximizing the efficiency of medical resource utilization.
Since its inception, Wei Jianfeng has positioned the company to align with the overarching direction of healthcare reform, focusing on core clinical diagnosis and treatment services, and providing internet-based solutions from the inside out for large and medium-sized hospitals and medical institutions. As the company’s Chief Product Designer, he has continuously expanded its product portfolio based on internet healthcare. Currently, Zhuojian has established six major product systems: tiered diagnosis and treatment, internet hospital, mobile remote care, palm-top hospital, medical chain, and post-discharge medical service system. Among these, the products enabling tiered diagnosis and treatment are the Medical Consortium and the Medical Community, which have received the highest acclaim from large and medium-sized hospitals.
“Our medical consortium network has expanded across China, including provinces such as Zhejiang, Henan, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hubei, and Sichuan, where it has taken root and flourished, covering more than 1,500 hospitals nationwide,” Wei Jianfeng told VCBeat.
Taking the Henan Province Interconnected Smart Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform as an example, a tiered diagnosis and treatment pathway of "initial consultation at the primary care level, treatment of serious illnesses at hospitals, and rehabilitation back in the community" was implemented within just one year. Collaborative relationships were established with 17 municipal-level hospitals across 18 prefecture-level cities and 111 county-level hospitals in 108 counties and districts throughout the province, achieving direct data connectivity and operational synergy. By the end of 2016, the platform had facilitated 3,210 remote consultations, 1,739 upward and downward patient referrals, 11,430 remote electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnoses, 7,364 remote pathology diagnoses, 30,650 on-site free clinic visits, 27,225 ward rounds, 1,068 demonstration surgeries, 7,570 consultations for difficult and complex cases, 1,848 teaching and training sessions, and follow-up care for 128 patients in different locations.
As for the Hangzhou Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform, after nearly four years of research and product refinement, it has established the “Hangzhou Model” of tiered diagnosis and treatment, characterized by “patients’ willingness to seek care at primary levels, primary care institutions’ capacity to receive them, and hospitals’ readiness to refer them,” becoming a national benchmark for prefecture-level city tiered diagnosis and treatment systems.
Discussing the company’s profitability, Wei Jianfeng expressed considerable satisfaction: “Based on the monthly revenue figures from 2017, the company’s annual revenue is projected to exceed RMB 200 million this year. Last year, total revenue was only in the tens of millions, but we saw rapid growth in the first quarter of this year.”
Little did people realize that this outcome was hard-won through countless hospital visits, numerous negotiations with hospital directors, and the team’s endurance of immense hardships. “Dr. Wei is our company’s frequent flyer, traveling for business every Tuesday or Wednesday,” a company employee told VCBeat.
“Internet Plus” is an irreversible tidal wave of the era. In the current landscape, where “Internet Plus” has brought about tremendous changes to daily life, and as various industries rapidly integrate with it at a “viral” pace, the opportunity for “Healthcare Plus Internet” is right before our eyes. “This year, I have set myself a plan: to sign contracts with 100 hospitals,” said Wei Jianfeng.
“From the perspective of corporate revenue alone, the income generated in the first three months of this year has been encouraging. ‘Now is not the time to rest on our laurels; rather, we must mobilize the entire company’s resources and make a concerted push.’”
Policy deregulation and support have brought unprecedented opportunities to the healthcare industry. On March 28, at the National Healthcare Reform Work Conference held in Beijing, Vice Premier Liu Yandong specifically pointed out that by 2017, all tertiary public hospitals must fully participate, take the lead in establishing medical consortia, break regional restrictions, achieve vertical integration, facilitate the downward flow of resources, and use shared interests as a bond to form communities of management, responsibility, and development.
It goes without saying that the construction of medical consortiums and the implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment in Grade A tertiary hospitals will experience explosive growth in 2017. Zhuojian, with its deep engagement on the healthcare provider (H) side, had already completed and refined all preparations centered around the new healthcare reforms for tiered diagnosis and treatment well before this market surge. Iconic cases of medical consortiums and internet hospitals have emerged one after another, such as Hangzhou’s Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment and Family Doctor Contracting Platform, the Internet Hospital of The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and Henan Province’s Interconnected Smart Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Collaboration Platform.
“In fact, Zhuojian Technology has long been a well-known name in the healthcare IT industry and is by no means obscure. It just hasn’t gained widespread recognition among end users because, unlike other healthcare companies invested in by Tencent, it does not focus primarily on consumer-facing (C-end) services. Perhaps it was only when Tencent’s investment involved Haodafu, a platform familiar to many patients, that Zhuojian’s name began to emerge more prominently within the industry,” said the director of the Information Department at a tertiary Grade-A hospital in a telephone interview with the reporter.
Dr. Wei seemed unfazed by this. “Everyone is quietly waiting for the wind to rise.” Commenting on this, Wei Jianfeng said, “We are witnessing a medical transformation that occurs once in fifty years. What we need to do now is to seize the moment. For us, whether the wind comes or not, what we are doing will not change; we just happen to be standing at the eye of the storm.”