With 20 Years of Radiology Experience, He Founded a Company Bringing Cloud-Based Imaging Diagnostics to Grassroots Healthcare

Founder and CEO of Yunying MedicalYu Feng

The weak capacity of primary healthcare institutions is a major cause of the difficulties and high costs patients face in accessing medical care, and it remains a key focus and challenge of healthcare reform. The root causes lie in an unreasonable structure of the workforce, severe brain drain of professional talent, lagging informatization efforts, and outdated facilities and equipment.

Yu Feng, Founder and CEO of Yunying Medical, has over 20 years of extensive experience in the field of radiological imaging. Through years of hands-on practice, he has identified two prevalent pain points facing primary healthcare institutions: a shortage of physicians and outdated hardware facilities.

The vacancy rate for licensed physicians in primary healthcare institutions generally exceeds 70%. Most of these professionals are unwilling to return to primary care settings, resulting in low utilization rates of medical equipment. In some remote areas, even basic equipment such as X-ray machines is unavailable. Where equipment is present, the scarcity of physician resources often hinders the normal operation of clinical services.

In 2015, Yu Feng founded Yunying Medical, a comprehensive enterprise focused on the research and development of digital imaging equipment, medical image transmission and storage, and cloud platforms, while providing cloud-based diagnostic services for medical imaging. Since its inception, Yu Feng has aimed to deliver professional medical imaging services to small and medium-sized healthcare institutions.

Yunying Medical empowers primary healthcare institutions to strengthen talent development, upgrade equipment, and advance informatization through its comprehensive medical imaging informatics solutions, thereby enhancing the overall quality of medical services and delivering superior care to a broader population at the grassroots level.

Weak service capabilities at primary healthcare institutions have led to widespread public distrust, driving patients to seek care at large hospitals. Therefore, to truly achieve the tiered diagnosis and treatment goal of “minor illnesses treated within the township, major illnesses treated within the county,” it is essential to enhance the overall service capacity of primary healthcare institutions.

Yunying Medical has broken away from the traditional, singular model of merely providing equipment or services. By offering a comprehensive suite of solutions encompassing hardware, software, personnel, operations, and management, it helps primary healthcare institutions address challenges across four key areas: equipment, platforms, physicians, and patients, thereby enabling them to build an integrated medical imaging ecosystem.

This concept not only helps healthcare institutions save on labor, financial, and communication costs, but also enhances their service efficiency and ensures service stability.

In November 2016, Shenzhen Yunying Medical Imaging Remote Diagnosis Center Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Yunying Medical, officially obtained the Medical Institution Practicing License. This marked Yunying Medical’s status as a formal medical institution, granting it the qualification to issue legally valid diagnostic reports, thereby providing more comprehensive safeguards for the medical institutions and the public it serves.

Meanwhile, Yunying Medical also provides a compliant platform for radiologists to practice medicine at multiple institutions, facilitating the decentralization of high-quality medical resources to grassroots levels while generating additional transparent income for physicians.

Resource integration is key to future development. Yunying Medical plans to collaborate with more internet healthcare platforms, working from the ground up to connect with more secondary and tertiary hospitals as well as expert physician resources, thereby comprehensively expanding access to medical care for primary-care patients.

In addition, Yunying Medical plans to engage in broader collaborations with more medical device hardware manufacturers and companies committed to providing specialized services for primary healthcare.

Yu Feng believes that,Sales of imaging equipment are transitioning from the 1.0 and 2.0 eras to the 3.0 era.In the 1.0 era, medical equipment focused solely on product placement, representing a purely traditional sales model. In the 2.0 era, service components were added alongside product sales. In the 3.0 era, the value chain extends from products to services and further to diagnosis, integrating every link of the medical equipment lifecycle. Through Cloud Imaging solutions, a closed-loop system for medical imaging services can be achieved.

Looking ahead, Yunying Medical’s development goals will focus on three key areas:

First, enable more radiologists to increase their legitimate income through multi-site practice, thereby enhancing their professional value;

Second, ensure that primary healthcare institutions can afford and effectively utilize advanced medical imaging equipment;

Third, let Yunying Medical Imaging Center take root and bear fruit at the grassroots level.

Yu Feng hopes that by implementing these three development goals, high-quality medical resources will be brought to the grassroots level, the overall medical service capabilities of primary healthcare institutions will be enhanced, the national tiered diagnosis and treatment system will be effectively implemented, and more people at the grassroots level will have access to higher-quality medical services.

Note: All data related to the company mentioned in this article were provided and confirmed by the interviewee.