WeDoctor Invests in Beilian to Build China's Leading Maternal and Child Health Ecosystem
WeDoctor recently issued an official announcement stating that it has formally completed a strategic investment in Beilian Technology. Following the investment and integration, WeDoctor has become the largest shareholder of Beilian Technology. The former Beilian Technology has been renamed “WeDoctor Beilian,” marking the company’s comprehensive strategic transformation and upgrade.
As indicated in the announcement, Micro Medical’s strategic investment in Beilian reflects a clear strategic layout: Micro Medical, which provides internet healthcare services, commands a large-scale base of physicians and online users, while Beilian, which provides in-hospital Wi-Fi services for maternal and child health hospitals, possesses the most extensive offline service data and precise user insights from these facilities. By combining vast resources of physicians, users, and offline hospitals, a new maternal and child health ecosystem is taking shape. Through closed-loop integration of online and offline services, the partnership aims to build China’s largest maternal and child healthcare service platform, thereby establishing a comprehensive maternal and infant health ecosystem.
In fact, the merger between Beilian and Weiyi’s maternal and child health segment was initiated earlier this year. In February, at the China Maternal and Child Health Science and Technology Conference held in the Great Hall of the People, Weiyi, together with Beilian Technology, launched the National Internet Maternal and Child Hospital Platform. The completion of this strategic investment marks a significant step forward for Weiyi in the vertical field of internet healthcare, with its “one comprehensive, multiple verticals” disciplinary operational landscape taking initial shape.
Industry insiders generally believe that achieving profitability and sustaining healthy operations has become a strategic imperative for internet healthcare startups. The maternal and infant sector is undoubtedly one of the segments capable of driving rapid revenue growth. The expansion into this area by multiple platforms, including Meiyou, further underscores its potential.
“In the realm of online consumer spending, women have consistently accounted for the majority share, representing nearly 80% of total consumption. Beauty, health, and children are the primary drivers of female consumer behavior,” pointed out Li Fan, Senior Vice President of WeDoctor and General Manager of WeDoctor Beilian. “The population of women and children in China exceeds 800 million, and this number continues to grow with the implementation of the two-child policy. Only by ensuring robust maternal and child health can we achieve a qualitative improvement in the overall health standards of the entire population.”
Li Fan’s analysis suggests that maternal and child health services in China are currently highly fragmented, lacking continuity and precision. This fragmentation causes inconvenience for women and increases their cost of living. Therefore, Micro Medical Group aims to integrate resources and optimize services by merging its maternal and infant division with Beilian Technology. Through self-operated models, equity investments, and other approaches, the company intends to build a comprehensive maternal and child health industry chain, establishing an integrated online-to-offline closed-loop system. This will ensure that every mother receives complete and continuous health services throughout the perinatal period. Online services include health education, specialized disease appointment scheduling, online consultations, remote second opinions and referrals, online medication purchases, and payment and insurance claims processing. Offline services encompass specialized outpatient clinics, targeted surgical procedures, rehabilitation and nursing care, as well as other value-added services.
To better facilitate user health management, Weiyi Beilian will establish long-term follow-up health records for users. This includes creating pregnancy registrations, pre-conception check-ups, delivery records, postpartum follow-ups, and newborn registrations from pregnancy through early childhood, as well as maintaining continuous health records of the newborn’s growth. These records will enable the provision of precisely targeted health education content and facilitate real-time, interactive, large-scale integration of health big data across China.
Reporters have found that, in addition to the maternal and child health sector, WeDoctor has also extended its in-depth internet healthcare operations to other specialized medical fields. Early this year, WeDoctor partnered with the globally renowned pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to establish China’s first vertical disease-specific tiered diagnosis and treatment platform—the National Digestive System Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform. Furthermore, WeDoctor’s Wuzhen Internet Hospital successively established multiple specialty teleconsultation centers in 2016, focusing on pancreatic cancer, integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine for liver diseases, dermatology, and HIV/AIDS. By continuously implementing a “multi-vertical” strategy across various specialties and diseases, WeDoctor strengthens its focused efforts in niche areas, thereby delivering more efficient, precise, and professional healthcare services.
In terms of its “comprehensive” strategy, WeDoctor started as Guahao.com and, after several years of development, has connected more than 1,900 key hospitals, onboarded 220,000 physicians, registered 117 million real-name users, and served nearly 800 million patient visits in total. It has become China’s largest internet healthcare platform, with its affiliated Wuzhen Internet Hospital emerging as a flagship project in China’s internet hospital sector in 2016.
Industrial ecosystem is crucial to improving efficiency and ensuring sustainable corporate development. In an interview, Li Fan stated that the merger between WeDoctor’s maternal and child health segment and Beilian aims to build an efficient, transparent, and accessible industrial ecosystem. The foundation for constructing this ecosystem is already in place, namelyThis merger has given rise to three major value platforms: the Big Data Platform, the Internet Hospital for Women and Children, and the Maternal and Child Health Service Platform.
Data shows that Micro Medical Group currently collaborates with over 800 maternal and child health hospitals, engaging 40,000 obstetricians, gynecologists, and pediatricians, and serving more than 60 million users in the maternal and child health sector. Meanwhile, Beilian has extended its Wi-Fi service coverage to more than 1,500 hospitals across over 380 cities nationwide, accumulating over 230 million service encounters and boasting a large-scale base of real-world users.
Leveraging the aforementioned resources, WeDoctor Beilian will establish a big data platform for maternal and child health. The platform will apply multi-dimensional tagging to data, recommend targeted products and services to users, and direct patients to appropriate medical service scenarios based on their conditions. This will facilitate user referral for both online and offline hospitals, optimize the patient care journey, and reduce costs.
WeDoctor Beilian holds the only internet-based women’s and children’s hospital license in China and possesses a Medical Institution Practice License issued by the National Health and Family Planning Commission. It is authorized to provide diagnostic and therapeutic services in specialties including internal medicine, surgery, gynecology, pediatrics, and traditional Chinese medicine. “By connecting three key populations—pregnant and postpartum women, children, and women in general—through online entry points, and categorizing them by region, symptoms, and needs, we deliver one-stop healthcare services to maternal and child health users nationwide, including specialized appointment scheduling, online consultations, targeted surgical referrals, e-prescriptions, and medication delivery,” stated Li Fan. He added that with the launch of WeDoctor Health Insurance, users will also be able to enjoy customized membership services in the future, achieving outcome-based care, health management, and cost coverage.
In light of the shortage of pediatricians and the weak primary healthcare capacity in China, Internet-based Women’s and Children’s Hospitals will facilitate physician collaboration, exchange, and continuing education through expert deployment, clinical guidance, and online training, thereby supporting the development of obstetrics, gynecology, and pediatrics nationwide.
According to available information, in addition to strengthening its online presence, Weiyi Beilian is also developing physical hospitals for women and children. By establishing a group of medical institutions that integrate advanced talent, equipment, and management, the company aims to provide users with comprehensive services including medical care, surgery, health maintenance, and rehabilitation. It is understood that these physical women’s and children’s health centers will be sequentially launched in cities such as Hangzhou, Chengdu, Changzhou, Beijing, and Shenzhen. Furthermore, Weiyi Beilian has initiated and established a Maternal and Child Health Industry Fund, focusing on investment and integration across the upstream and downstream segments of the maternal and child health industry chain to accelerate the improvement of its industrial layout.
The aforementioned big data platform for maternal and child health, the internet-based maternal and child hospital, and the physical women’s and children’s hospital complement one another and share resources in a cyclical manner, jointly constituting a maternal and child health service platform that is “grounded in maternal and child health and centered on maternal and child medical care.”
Leveraging the scarcity of its internet-based maternal and child health hospital license, combined with the professionalism of its offline physical institutions, Weiyi Beilian can break through the two major bottlenecks in corporate development—user acquisition and access to medical resources. This enables the rapid formation of a closed-loop ecosystem and scalable replication, thereby achieving large-scale accumulation and application of health big data. The value proposition of the maternal and child health service platform thus holds significant potential for future growth.