Yihu Daojia: A Light-Asset Model Revolutionizing Grassroots Healthcare with Over 30 Million Downloads and Presence in 240+ Cities
Wei Guilei, Chief Operating Officer
In the nursing industry, Huayi Daojia leverages an asset-light operating model to drive internet-based medical and elderly care services; in layman's terms, it achieves significant outcomes with minimal investment.
In December 2015, First Video invested RMB 30 million as an angel investor to establish Beijing Qianyi Health Management Co., Ltd. for the development of the “Yihu Daojia” app, China’s first health service platform connecting doctors, nurses, and patients, and the nation’s first government-approved internet-based medical and elderly care service project.
With over a year since its launch, "Huyi Daojia" has accumulated more than 30 million registered downloads and certified over 20,000 nurses, enabling direct booking of in-home services in more than 240 cities across China. Similar to "Didi," the platform allows users to schedule nearby doctors and nurses at any time for in-home nursing, elderly home care, traditional Chinese medicine physiotherapy, and other health services.
Recently, Hushi Daojia has partnered with major platforms such as Chunyu Yisheng, 58 Daojia, Baidu Doctor, Alipay, and WeChat to integrate home-visit nursing services. What has attracted so many nurses and doctors to join? Wei Guilei, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, revealed the secrets behind its impressive figures in an exclusive interview with VCBeat.
Recently, Huayi Daojia has been celebrating a series of joyous occasions.
On December 6, 2016, Yihu Daojia partnered with WeChat to launch its services within the “58 Daojia Health Services” section of the WeChat Wallet.
Subsequently, it launched online consultations with the mobile healthcare platform Chunyu Doctor, health checkup services with iKang Guobin, home medication delivery with Kuaifang Medicine, and caregiver nursing services with Taixin Kanghu, jointly creating a closed-loop health ecosystem for hundreds of millions of families.
As a rising star, “Hushi Daojia” (Nurse to Home) has not only gained massive traffic by partnering with these industry giants but also enabled more users to access their professional services, firmly establishing itself as the largest at-home nursing service platform in China. “Currently, our platform has over 20,000 state-certified registered nurses, primarily distributed across first- and second-tier cities with developed economies. Among them, Beijing has more than 6,000 certified nurses, Shanghai over 2,000, and Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and other cities each have approximately 1,000,” said Wei Guilei.
According to data released by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, the total number of registered nurses in China reached 3.24 million by the end of 2015. Based on the ratio of nurses to the total population in most countries worldwide, China currently faces a shortage of several million nurses, indicating a severe insufficiency in the allocation of nursing human resources.
So, how did Huhudaojia attract these nurses to join? According to Wei Guilei, Huhudaojia initially recruited three full-time nurses, which encouraged their friends and classmates to join as well. Through referrals from acquaintances, they acquired more than 1,000 seed nurses within a month.
More than 80% of the nurses who joined in the early stages came from Grade A tertiary hospitals. Since nurses typically work in shifts, they have considerable spare time. This is particularly true in economically developed provinces and municipalities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, where Grade A tertiary hospitals are densely concentrated. These regions boast a large number of highly skilled registered nurses who, despite their relatively lower income levels, demonstrate strong enthusiasm for providing home-based nursing services. Currently, over 60,000 registered nurses have submitted applications for certification on the “Yihudaojia” platform. Among them, 20,000 have passed the review and obtained certification, while as many as 43,000 were rejected due to reasons such as having less than three years of clinical nursing experience.
Regarding in-home nursing services, service quality is of paramount importance. Therefore, before joining the platform, each nurse must upload their Nurse Qualification Certificate and Nurse Practicing Certificate. Only after staff verify these credentials through the official website of the National Health and Family Planning Commission can the nurses pass the review and activate their in-home service privileges.
Therefore, to establish the core competitiveness of “Nurses to Home” and move away from homogenized online consultations, Wei Guilei has focused heavily on the nursing workforce, directing patient traffic to more professional platforms with larger user bases. This approach allows the company to achieve maximum efficiency with limited resources. In the current climate where monetization in internet healthcare remains challenging, this “asset-light” model may well be the lifeline that saves the business.
As "Nurses to Home" accelerates its nationwide expansion across China, there is a growing need for more experienced nurses to participate. Given the limited supply of nursing professionals, Wei Guilei has adopted an “asset-light” strategy: appointing one regional head nurse in each area, who may serve on either a part-time or full-time basis, with compensation tied to a percentage of the transaction volume generated within that region.
In his view, the head nurse serves as a frontline manager and organizer within the hospital’s nursing workforce, acting as the specific leader and commander of departmental nursing operations. Given their extensive experience in both professional skills and management capabilities, they are well-suited for platform-based nursing roles.
Regarding the selection of regional head nurses, Wei Guilei stated, “Regional head nurses are selected from certified nurses with extensive management experience across various regions served by ‘Yihu Daojia.’ They typically possess eight or more years of clinical nursing experience. Upon receiving complaints about excessive wait times for home visits or substandard service quality, the regional head nurse will immediately contact the visiting nurse and, if necessary, arrive at the scene within the shortest possible time to provide on-site coordination or guidance.”
Meanwhile, the head nurse will also organize nursing staff to study nursing business techniques and cultivate nurses' qualities. For example, a user in Area A places an order requesting a home visit for blood draw, but the nurse fails to succeed after three attempts. At this point, the regional head nurse needs to personally conduct the blood draw, as the regional head nurse has more experience than the regular nurse. Therefore, the regional head nurse serves as a flexible resource, ready to handle emergency situations occurring in that area at any time.
According to Wei Guilei, to ensure the safety of nurses’ home visits and improve the quality of their services, Daojia Nursing has implemented the “Angel Eye Initiative.” Under this program, nurses must click “Depart for Home Visit” before setting out. Based on the GPS location of the service address, the platform then pushes information such as the nurse’s route and scheduled service time to the regional head nurse stationed in that area.
During the period of nurses’ home visits, the PICC Comprehensive Accident Insurance and Ping An Third-Party Nursing Liability Insurance, provided free of charge to nurses by Yihu Daojia, officially take effect. Additionally, Yihu Daojia has established a Tier-3A Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Group with a stringent access mechanism. Regarding practicing physician certification, professionals conduct rigorous audits and verification of physicians’ practice certificates and perform effective identity confirmation. Taking into account variations in physicians’ professional competence, Yihu Daojia initially focuses on certifying physicians from major Tier-3A hospitals across China. For physicians from non-Tier-3A hospitals and TCM practitioners working in local clinics, a minimum of five years of experience in TCM practice is required.
For services provided by physicians during home visits, there are also clear conditions and scope limitations. Patients or their family members must sign and confirm the "Informed Consent Form" before the physician’s home visit, after which the physician may provide health services such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) physiotherapy or follow-up visits for chronic disease management.
Furthermore, according to the head of the “Yihu Daojia” app, the Sanjia Traditional Chinese Medicine Group has partnered with PICC, Asia’s largest insurer, to launch an accident protection service in the near future. This initiative will provide free comprehensive accident insurance coverage for both doctors and patients, alleviating concerns for both parties. In addition, Yihu Daojia has implemented a physician service evaluation system, allowing patients or their family members to select TCM practitioners based on the number of positive reviews and to rate doctors who provide home-visit services.
As of 2015, China’s population aged 60 and above had reached 220 million, with the number of disabled or partially disabled elderly exceeding 40 million, accompanied by a severe shortage of geriatric nurses. Yihu Daoba will leverage the sharing economy model to provide solutions to this challenge.
“Healthcare is a unique industry that requires policy guidance for enterprises to achieve faster growth,” said Wei Guilei.
Therefore, this year Beijing will focus on addressing the “last mile” challenge in home-based elderly care services, bringing such services directly to seniors’ doorsteps. Beijing has issued the Implementation Opinions on Implementing the Integration of Medical and Health Services with Elderly Care Services, which clarifies that medical expenses incurred through home-based medical services, such as regular house calls, shall be covered by the medical insurance fund if they comply with medical insurance regulations.
In fact, Huayi Daojia does not only provide nursing care but also offers the following services:
TCM Chronic Disease Services primarily provide TCM physical therapies, such as Tuina, massage, Gua Sha, and cupping, delivered by platform-certified licensed physicians, along with chronic disease follow-up services for patients with diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.
Home-based elderly care services provide non-pharmacological prevention and intervention for seniors with disabilities or partial disabilities, including health monitoring such as blood pressure and blood glucose measurements, lifestyle guidance, healthy dietary advice, and regular in-home medical check-ups and nursing care by nurses.
Triage and Accompaniment Services: Based on the patient's condition, we provide triage recommendations for hospitals, departments, and physicians. Our accompaniment services include appointment registration at over 1,000 key hospitals across China, medication pickup and delivery, transport of medical reports, and provision of information on services surrounding hospital facilities.
As can be seen, in terms of business model, “Hushi Daojia” has solved the long-standing challenge of mobile health apps lacking a viable revenue model by building a platform that connects doctors, nurses, and patients and generating revenue through platform service fees.
In terms of product and service offerings, Huayi Daojia has innovatively entered the market with its “Nurse Home Visit” model, leveraging nurses’ off-duty hours to provide 16 types of in-home nursing services—such as injections, intravenous infusions, dressing changes, and blood draws—to nearby patients.
In terms of its operational model, "Nurse Home Visit" innovatively proposed an asset-light strategic platform model combining self-operated and joint-venture operations. In addition to providing self-operated nurse home-visit services, it partnered with China's most professional service operators—such as iKang Guobin, Chunyu Doctor, Kuai Fang Song Yao, Guan Jia Bang, Tai Xin Kang Hu, and Nai Niu Ma Ma—to deliver a closed-loop health service ecosystem for patients, encompassing medical examinations, online consultations, medication delivery, nursing care, and lactation support. This approach rapidly propelled the company to become the biggest dark horse in the mobile healthcare industry.
The remarkable achievements of “Yihu Daojia” are fundamentally attributable to its elite team, characterized by their boldness and diligence.
As an internally incubated product of First Video, its core team is entirely composed of the product, technology, and operations personnel from Lottery 365, China’s first mobile internet lottery app. Currently, Beijing Qianyi Health Management Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of First Video, has a total staff of 98, including 45 in the technology team, while 11 members of the product and operations teams have medical-related backgrounds.
Peng Xitao officially assumed the role of CEO of Yihu Daojia in December 2015. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Communication and Applications from Nankai University. In 2005, he joined First Video Group as Chief Engineer, where he led the research and development of the First Video website. In 2009, he served as CEO of Yicai Sunshine (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., overseeing the operations of Lottery 365 and China Sports Lottery Network.
With over 15 years of management experience in technology, strategy, and internet companies, he co-founded First Video Group. Renowned for his exceptional logical thinking and market insight, he spearheaded the launch of China’s first online video syndication platform and led the Lottery 365 mobile client to achieve annual sales nearing RMB 10 billion.
Wei Guilei, Chief Operating Officer. Born in 1982, he holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is the 18th-generation descendant of Wei Gongji, a prefect during the Ming Dynasty. He joined Capital Normal University Press in 2006, where he successively served as Technical Manager of “Yixian Gaokao Wang” (Frontline College Entrance Exam Network) and Director of the Internet Department.
Resigned in 2008 to found “Jiuyi Games,” which was subsequently sold to People.cn. In 2011, joined First Video. Possesses over 10 years of experience in internet product operations and marketing, with a career spanning the promotion and operation of educational portal websites, casual gaming platforms, mobile internet lottery services, and mobile healthcare products.
Set the national record for the highest number of servers launched in a single day for the web game “DDTank”; the lottery platform Caipiao 365, under his operational leadership, became China’s first lottery app to surpass 100 million downloads.
Li Zhen, Chief Nursing Officer. Born in 1987, he is a former nurse supervisor in the Department of Hematology at Peking University People's Hospital and a co-founder of Sanjia Nurse Group. In August 2015, he joined First Video, where he spearheaded the establishment of China’s first nurse group by collaborating with over 1,000 nurses from prestigious institutions including Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Peking University People's Hospital, The First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, Nanfang Hospital, and Ruijin Hospital Shanghai.
She has over eight years of clinical nursing experience in tertiary hospitals, with proficiency in common clinical nursing techniques as well as emergency resuscitation and critical care monitoring. She possesses extensive experience in clinical procedures such as injections, intravenous infusions, blood sampling, dressing changes, urinary catheterization, and nasogastric feeding, along with medical-nursing coordination and nursing management. She excels in venipuncture for patients with poor vascular conditions and is widely acclaimed by patients as “Li the One-Shot.”
“This is a team of post-80s professionals who are daring and hardworking. During the product development phase, many colleagues voluntarily stayed late on Fridays to accelerate the product launch, sometimes working until 5 a.m. When fatigue set in, they would chat to stay awake. It took only one and a half months to complete the entire process—from research and development to testing and official launch—for both the patient-facing and healthcare-provider versions of the ‘Nurses and Doctors at Home’ app,” said Wei Guilei.
Huyi Daojia has gradually gotten on track. Wei Guilei is not concerned about funding issues; his only concern is that the company’s growth pace may be too slow. The company is currently launching its Series A financing round, aiming to raise RMB 60 million in exchange for 15% of Huyi Daojia’s total equity. The proceeds will be used for subsequent market expansion, personnel costs, brand promotion, and other related expenses.