Tencent QQ Launches 'Free Ask-a-Doctor' Service in Partnership with Yilian to Build a Multi-Path Healthcare Ecosystem
Recently, Tencent MobileQQ has launched a new service called “Free Doctor Consultation” in the City Services section of its QQ Wallet. According to the official announcement, users can receive responses from professional doctors within as little as three minutes by simply submitting their questions online.
According to incomplete statistics, over 70% of users of internet-based mobile healthcare services seek personal health consultations. Among these consultations, in addition to issues directly related to medical care, a significant proportion involves concerns about sub-health, exercise, and physiological wellness. Users with such concerns often do not seek hospital-based medical attention.
The “Free Doctor Consultation” service caters to the needs of this vast user base, starting with personal health consultations and integrating a comprehensive healthcare industry service chain that spans medical diagnosis and treatment, health management, exercise and wellness, pharmaceutical services, and health screenings.
It is reported that the professional physicians providing backend consultation services for the “Free Doctor Consultation” feature are from the Medlinker platform. Currently, Medlinker has over 400,000 verified practicing physicians, more than 75% of whom are attending physicians or above, including over 230,000 physicians from Grade A tertiary hospitals. Leveraging Tencent Mobile QQ’s massive monthly active user base of over 600 million, these physicians will be able to utilize their professional expertise to provide professional, reliable, and safe health support and All-Health services to the majority of China’s mobile internet users and their families and friends.
Meanwhile, this service holds significant potential value for public health initiatives. Taking epidemic prevention and control as an example, traditional approaches have often relied on manual surveys or the collection of patient visit data from medical institutions. These methods suffer from inherent lags and fail to effectively capture data on individuals who do not seek medical care, resulting in regional epidemic monitoring that is both delayed and inaccurate. However, by shifting data investigation and analysis to the initial consultation stage, a larger number of samples can be rapidly identified. Leveraging vast medical big data, data engineers can assist public health administrators in conducting structured data analysis on population samples within specific regions. This yields a range of statistical insights, including local macro-level health status, the distribution of common diseases, and trends in infectious diseases, thereby generating more comprehensive regional public health data to support decision-making in governance. Compared with traditional public health management methods, this approach enables monitoring of a wider variety of diseases, offers faster response times, and provides more accurate statistical data and predictive outcomes.