Ant Group Aims to Become the Infrastructure of Internet Healthcare with Its Medical Open Platform

The healthcare industry faces numerous pain points. Breaking through, innovating, and driving change pose significant challenges and difficulties for enterprises. It is no easy task to identify a business model that truly serves patients well while simultaneously generating economic benefits for the company.

In the healthcare industry, there is no shortage of medical companies. Many firms possess clinical capabilities and service delivery expertise. However, none are willing to open up their foundational capabilities to support the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Ant Financial’s Healthcare Open Platform aims to become the infrastructure for the internet healthcare sector. All solutions corresponding to mature services will be fully opened to partners, including payment, security, data, as well as Ant Financial’s proprietary credit and anti-fraud capabilities. Partners can leverage these open capabilities to jointly create innovative and differentiated solutions.

Taking appointment registration as an example, Alipay has integrated with nearly all third-party appointment platforms in China, making it the largest appointment registration platform in the country.

From August to November last year, Ant Financial revised its mobile payment solution for medical insurance over 50 times through repeated communications with the Shenzhen Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau. Finally, in December, it officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the bureau.

By the time mobile medical insurance payments were officially launched in June this year, Alipay had already been piloted in 17 hospitals in Shenzhen, including some of the city’s most renowned institutions such as The University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Hospital, Peking University Shenzhen Hospital, and Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital.

On November 8, 2016, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security officially released the “Internet + Human Resources and Social Security 2020 Action Plan,” announcing a clear commitment to vigorously promote mobile payment for medical insurance. This signaled that the door to mobile medical insurance payments was formally opening to third-party payment platforms; however, the journey has been exceedingly arduous.

In hospital settings, Ant Financial provides a range of solutions for healthcare institutions:

Appointment registration, queueing, consultation order management, report retrieval, and medication dispensing are long-standing challenges in healthcare. Ant Financial can provide hospitals with products such as Service Windows, electronic medical cards, Face-to-Face Pay, Huabei installment plans, and Zhima Credit scores, thereby enhancing hospital operational efficiency.

Taking the Guangzhou Women and Children’s Medical Center as an example, users with a Zhima Credit score of 650 or above can enjoy the “treatment first, payment later” service. They can receive medical care at the hospital without immediate payment, settling the bill after returning home. This approach not only improves doctor-patient relationships but also enhances the overall healthcare service experience.

To address the issue of scalpers, Ant Financial employs its “Ant Shield” RAIN scoring system, which also addresses hospitals’ concerns and pain points regarding system upgrades and information security. By leveraging “Ant Shield,” hospitals can effectively identify and prevent scalping activities in appointment registration. Whether tickets are snatched by automated bots or by human scalpers, “Ant Shield” is capable of detecting such behavior.

Furthermore, Ant Financial leverages Alibaba Cloud’s “Yi Dun” to provide protection for hospitals. “Yi Dun” primarily delivers security hardening at the infrastructure and network levels, safeguarding hospitals against various external internet threats, including hacking, DDoS attacks, password cracking, and appointment slot hijacking, through a comprehensive suite of cloud computing applications that offer integrated security solutions.

In the healthcare sector, basic medical insurance, commercial health insurance, and out-of-pocket payments constitute the three core payment channels. However, under the current system, the development of commercial health insurance remains relatively slow. This is primarily because many insurers are unable to access hospital data, posing significant challenges to actuarial product design.

For individual consumers, the experience of purchasing commercial health insurance products and then filing claims is far from satisfactory. To address this issue, Ant Group has launched a real-time claims settlement solution for commercial health insurance, enabling users to not only enjoy“One-Stop Integrated Payment via Medical Insurance, Commercial Insurance, and Out-of-Pocket Expenses”Meanwhile, it has also achievedCommercial Insurance Claims Achieve Instant "Second-Payout"。

Alipay’s data service tags can define numerous user segments. For the healthcare industry, how can these tagged data be leveraged? For instance, maternal and child healthcare providers can use the Ant Open Platform to identify data on new mothers or expectant mothers, thereby precisely delivering their specialized products and services to these users. With such targeted services, users are more likely to provide post-service reviews, which in turn enhances the provider’s overall influence and enables more healthcare institutions to benefit from their offerings.

Since the launch of Alipay Wallet 9.0, the homepage has become increasingly data-driven, with content personalized for each user. For instance, if a user registers an appointment at a smart hospital, Alipay Wallet will push this notification to the homepage as a message. Although such functionality originally resided on third-level pages, user behavior and service triggers have enabled cross-layer communication between services and users.

Furthermore, after registering for an appointment, patients may need guidance on how to reach the hospital or locate the parking facilities upon arrival. In response, messaging systems can proactively provide information on ancillary services and capabilities, thereby delivering added value in the healthcare sector.