BoRui Health and WeDoctor Forge Strategic Investment Partnership to Advance Medical Education

Alignmed Health's Multi-Platform Development Model

In 2016, Alignmed Health successfully listed on the New Third Board, becoming the first internet-based medical education and training enterprise to be listed on this exchange. Its flagship internet product, Yilin Network, has garnered significant attention.

On Singles’ Day, Zhongjian Tou (Hangzhou) Investment Management Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of WeDoctor, completed its subscription for the private placement of shares issued by Borui Health.

The successful completion of this subscription marks the formal establishment of a strategic investment relationship between WeDoctor and Alignmed Health. In the future, both parties will engage in deep strategic collaboration to advance the comprehensive development of Yilin Wang, the medical education platform under Alignmed Health.

After listing on the New Third Board, Borui Health secured strategic investment from WeDoctor, emerging as a leader in the internet-based medical education sector. How did it stand out among numerous medical education platforms? In an exclusive interview with VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat), founder Liu Chunmei revealed the story behind its success.

Before founding Yilin.com, Liu Chunmei earned an MBA from Durham University Business School in the UK. She worked at China Medical Forum for nearly eight years as Client Director, primarily serving global pharmaceutical companies operating in China and high-end medical resources both domestically and internationally. This experience allowed her to accumulate extensive industry resources and gain deep insights into the pain points of the medical education sector.

Medical education is a vital component of the educational sector and the foundation for the sustainable development of healthcare services. It must not only align with the general principles of education but also adhere to the unique patterns governing the development of medical professionals. “How to cultivate medical professionals with qualified competency levels and appropriately scaled numbers” is a critical issue facing the development of medical education in China.

In China, the duration of medical education, particularly in clinical medicine, varies significantly. Cultivating a clinical physician demands considerable time and effort. However, curricula often emphasize short-cycle science-based foundational courses while offering fewer quality-oriented courses in humanities and social sciences, with program lengths ranging from five to eight years. In “junior college-to-bachelor” upgrade programs, the total instructional hours exceed those of standard undergraduate programs, yet feature high content redundancy, leading to repetitive learning and inefficient use of educational resources. Moreover, many medical students, driven by the pursuit of higher academic credentials and degrees, repeatedly prepare for various entrance examinations and retake identical medical courses, resulting in substantial waste of students’ time and energy as well as institutional educational resources.

During the transition from medical school to clinical practice, physicians face limited opportunities for career advancement. They see a large volume of outpatients daily, leaving little time for scientific research and resulting in limited awareness of the latest international medical developments.

In Liu Chunmei’s view, physicians have numerous needs, including those for education, scientific research, clinical practice support, peer communication, doctor-patient interaction, and knowledge sharing. However, previous channels for such exchanges were relatively narrow, constrained by time and space, and often failed to achieve ideal outcomes.

Therefore, Liu Chunmei aims to build a bridge for these physicians by inviting international experts to China for training, thereby breaking down barriers to medical information. To this end, she has engaged both international and domestic experts to conduct offline training while also developing online resources. She has moved expert surgical courses online, designing curricula based on recent hot topics and experts’ latest research activities. By live-streaming international conferences, she enables users to access conference content from home, while also allowing them to ask questions, leave comments, and interact online.

After multiple attempts, Liu Chunmei found that the response from physicians was positive. In 2015, Borui Health founded Yilin Network, an international medical training platform tailored for clinical physicians to facilitate online learning and communication. Since its launch, Yilin Network has collaborated with thousands of authoritative expert mentors both in China and abroad to develop courses, launching more than 5,000 professional courses covering multiple disciplines.

“Yilin Cloud Academy” is a tailored communication platform for clinicians both in China and abroad, created by Yilin Network. By connecting international and domestic experts with Chinese physicians through remote networking, it facilitates efficient and convenient academic exchanges, truly realizing global medical communication and interoperability, and embodying the philosophy that “science knows no borders, and renowned doctors are as close as neighbors.”

After more than a year of dedicated development, Yilin Wang currently boasts over 50,000 users, with more than 50% being mid- and senior-level physicians from Grade A tertiary hospitals. Users from 67 countries and regions have logged in and utilized the platform.

In addition to training courses, Alignmed Health is continuously expanding its business segments, including training on writing and submitting papers to international journals, assisting physicians in applying for overseas advanced studies, and organizing China-specific sessions at international academic conferences, thereby helping physicians build their professional brands through multiple channels.

“China ranks among the top countries in the number of SCI paper submissions worldwide, yet the acceptance rate remains low, particularly for high-impact SCI journals,” Liu Chunmei told reporters.

Because physicians lacked a thorough understanding of their target journals prior to submission, the study types and manuscript formats they submitted failed to meet the journals’ requirements; furthermore, some studies had inherent flaws in their experimental design. Yilin Network organizes annual training workshops on writing for top-tier international journals, taught by senior editors from international journals, to help Chinese physicians successfully publish in SCI-indexed journals and thereby enhance their academic influence.

Meanwhile, leveraging its extensive international resources accumulated over the years, Alignmed Health assists physicians in securing opportunities for advanced studies abroad, thereby helping Chinese doctors achieve comprehensive improvements in both their professional expertise and healthcare management capabilities. Through collaborations with domestic and international academic associations, the company has successfully hosted China-specific sessions at international academic conferences, amplifying the leading academic voices of the Chinese medical community on the global stage.

Micro Medical Group’s decision to partner with Alignmed Health stems from the latter’s resources and expertise in medical training and education. Alignmed Health has cultivated deep specialization in professional medical education, accumulating extensive educational content and expert networks, and establishing a distinctive professional training system alongside integrated online and offline platforms. The two parties initiated discussions in July of this year and, over a three-month period, signed a share subscription agreement and reached a unified strategic cooperation framework. As a leading internet healthcare platform in China, Micro Medical Group, since its establishment in 2010, has connected its systems with information networks across 27 provinces and more than 2,000 key hospitals nationwide. It boasts over 110 million real-name registered users and 220,000 experts from key hospitals, having cumulatively served more than 800 million patient visits.

Through this strategic partnership, Alignmed and WeDoctor are poised to leverage their respective strengths and share high-quality resources, responding to the “Healthy China 2030” Plan by organically integrating medical education with healthcare services, and conducting in-depth exploration in areas such as medical discipline development, innovation in healthcare delivery models, and the translation of medical research achievements.

In response to the lack of standardized medical education and training, as well as the unbalanced development of urban-rural and regional healthcare services, we are implementing comprehensive discipline construction that integrates clinical practice, teaching, and research across China via internet hospitals and online medical education platforms. We are jointly building a national online-offline platform for consultations, physician training, clinical preceptorship, advanced studies, academic exchange, and scientific collaboration, thereby promoting advanced clinical techniques and research achievements nationwide. This initiative aims to channel high-quality educational and medical resources to grassroots levels, enhance the overall diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities of clinical disciplines, and support the tiered diagnosis and treatment system.

Meanwhile, the two parties will engage in in-depth collaboration on the translation of medical research achievements, helping physicians fully realize both the academic and commercial value of their scientific outcomes. This effort ultimately supports the national strategic plan for building a Healthy China, aligned with the initiative of “joint contribution, shared benefits, and health for all.”