Wuzhen Internet Hospital Partners with JD.com to Build an Integrated Internet Healthcare Ecosystem

Patients who often delay seeking care due to the difficulty of securing appointments or the long distance to hospitals, thereby worsening their condition, may find such challenges alleviated as the internet healthcare model continues to improve.

Recently, WeDoctor’s Wuzhen Internet Hospital officially launched on the JD.com platform. The two parties will join forces to create a closed-loop medical service for consumers, encompassing health consultations, online diagnosis, and online medication purchases.Jin Enlin, General Manager of JD Medicine City, stated that after Wuzhen Internet Hospital joins JD.com, it will leverage JD’s platform advantages and WeDoctor’s medical resource strengths to provide one-stop medical services to users across China—particularly those in grassroots and remote areas—through internet-based solutions, thereby improving the accessibility of healthcare services and alleviating difficulties in seeking medical care.

For a long time, the healthcare sector, which has garnered significant attention, has been characterized by an imbalance between the supply and demand of medical resources. On one hand, China’s medical resources are concentrated in economically developed regions, particularly in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. On the other hand, high-quality medical resources are clustered in large hospitals, leading to the common phenomenon of patients seeking care at major hospitals even for minor ailments. Large hospitals, originally positioned to handle acute and critical conditions, complex and refractory diseases, and talent training, end up treating patients with all types of conditions, resulting in overcrowding and exacerbating the difficulty of accessing medical care. Meanwhile, general hospitals and primary healthcare institutions exhibit the opposite trend.

In this context, as a supplement to traditional healthcare, internet-based medical services are gaining increasing popularity among users. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the “37th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.” As of December 2015, the number of internet healthcare users in China reached 152 million, accounting for 22.1% of all internet users. Among these, internet-based medical services used during the pre-consultation phase had the highest adoption rate, with a combined usage rate of 18.4% for online health information searches, online appointment registration, and online consultations.

The “Wuzhen Internet Hospital” section, jointly launched by JD.com and Wuzhen Internet Hospital, extends medical services from pre-consultation further into intra-consultation and post-consultation stages, providing users with a closed-loop healthcare service ecosystem that includes self-assessment, precise appointment scheduling, online consultations, remote multidisciplinary consultations, online follow-up visits, electronic prescriptions, and online medication purchases.

Specifically, JD Wuzhen Internet Hospital has launched online outpatient services across seven major departments: internal medicine, surgery, dermatology, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, traditional Chinese medicine, and otolaryngology. All JD users can access one-stop medical services—including online consultations, e-prescriptions, and online medication purchases—by visiting the JD Wuzhen Internet Hospital portal (care.jd.com). The electronic diagnostic certificates issued by physicians carry legal validity, are automatically saved, and can be viewed at any time by logging into a JD account. Medication purchases leverage JD Health’s extensive SKU inventory and the fast, convenient delivery services of JD Logistics. The ultimate goal of this partnership is to adopt a consumer-centric approach, addressing pain points such as difficulties in appointment scheduling, accessing medical care, and purchasing medications, by replicating offline hospital diagnosis and treatment processes online to provide greater convenience for consumers.

In addition, a representative from WeDoctor stated that,WeDoctor and JD.com will also leverage JD’s advantages in penetrating lower-tier markets to jointly deliver high-quality medical resources to rural, remote, and medically underserved areas. Furthermore, they will provide remote diagnosis and treatment services throughout the disease management cycle for hundreds of millions of chronic disease patients across China suffering from conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia, thereby alleviating the burden of regular hospital visits and long queues faced by these patients.

According to VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat), this marks the first collaboration between Wuzhen Internet Hospital and a comprehensive e-commerce platform. In December 2015, WeDoctor partnered with the Tongxiang Municipal Government to establish Wuzhen Internet Hospital. To date, Wuzhen Internet Hospital has achieved interoperability with the hospital information systems of 2,400 medical institutions, aggregating more than 7,200 expert teams and over 260,000 physicians. Currently, the daily patient consultation volume at Wuzhen Internet Hospital has reached 31,000 visits, surpassing the outpatient service capacity of a tertiary Grade A hospital.

Analysts believe that the collaboration between JD.com and Wuzhen Internet Hospital will accelerate the deep integration of the internet and healthcare. By leveraging the internet to organize medical resources and connect with online users, this partnership aims to achieve precise matching and service linkage, driving the evolution of internet healthcare from lightweight consultations toward a phase characterized by the integration of online and offline medical services and the interconnection and sharing of medical data. This cooperation will explore a more mature path for the future development of internet healthcare.