Aibei E-Med Transforms into a Pediatrician-Focused Learning and Social Platform, Aims to Build China's Largest Maternal and Child Healthcare Physician Group

The most representative example of the internet’s transformation of traditional industries remains e-commerce. This new retail model optimizes upstream supply chains by integrating consumer-side (i.e., demand-side) information, with its profits derived from the redistribution of incremental value generated through improved industry efficiency.

However, the aggregation of low-quality information on the demand side by mobile health platforms has struggled to drive efficiency improvements on the supply side. This is particularly true given the existing scarcity of high-quality medical resources. Consequently, mobile health models that claim to improve the patient experience but primarily aim to acquire users have almost universally encountered development bottlenecks.

As the financing trend declines from its peak, any interruption in capital infusion further highlights the inherent flaws in the business models of mobile health companies, leading to increasingly frequent layoffs and even project shutdowns.

Meanwhile, based on interactions with and observations of certain enterprises or specific market segments, the trend toward business model transformation—centered on enhancing the operational capabilities of offline medical entities through learning and training—is becoming increasingly pronounced.

For instance, in the pharmaceutical B2B sector, which had previously been largely focused on supply chain services, one company has recently launched a smart pharmacy incubation platform. This initiative aims to enhance the operational and management capabilities of independent pharmacies and even small micro-chains, thereby enabling them to compete with large pharmacy chains.

For another example, a project previously positioned for teledentistry has shifted to prioritize dental training as its flagship business following restructuring.

Furthermore, in the field of primary healthcare, initiatives have begun to prioritize enhancing the professional competence of primary care physicians as their core objective, investing hundreds of millions of yuan to promote international evidence-based clinical decision support tools and online medical education platforms at the grassroots level.

iBaby Medical has also undergone a similar transformation.

Ms. Yang Huiru, Chairwoman of Aibeier Medical

On October 22, iBaby Health held the inaugural “Most Beautiful Pediatrician” Awards Ceremony in Zhuhai (where the 21st National Academic Conference of Pediatrics of the Chinese Medical Association was also being held).

Yang Huiru, founder of iBaby Medical, stated that the company aims to become “the most authoritative alliance of perinatal medicine physicians, bringing together and integrating top pediatricians and obstetricians to build education and practice platforms.” Furthermore, the core business focus for this year and next will be the establishment of a training curriculum system for pediatricians and obstetricians.

About a year ago, Yang Huiru launched a mobile health initiative in Shenzhen, also focused on pediatrics, but with a business model centered on a consumer-facing (C-end) community for infants and toddlers. At that time, the platform arranged for two authoritative pediatric experts to provide free online consultations each evening, aiming primarily to attract followers. However, the results were underwhelming. This was partly because established brands already held significant first-mover advantages in the infant and toddler community space. More importantly, Yang Huiru believed that this model represented a substantial waste of expert resources.

Consequently, Yang Huiru discontinued that project and relocated the company to Beijing, shifting its business focus from serving patients to serving physicians, which led to the creation of the current Aibeier Yi platform.

After a year of exploration and reflection, Yang Huiru has clearly concluded that the core of internet healthcare is healthcare itself (with the internet serving merely as a tool to make services more convenient and efficient), and the core of healthcare lies with physicians. Patient illness is an incidental occurrence, and seeking medical care is a low-frequency demand; in contrast, physicians’ continuous learning and clinical practice are routine activities, representing high-frequency demands. Therefore, the Aibeier Yi platform takes providing valuable services to physicians as its primary starting point, positioning its model as building an education, training, and social media platform tailored for pediatricians and obstetricians, while also offering physicians patient management tools such as follow-up consultation and communication features.

Currently, pediatricians are the most scarce medical specialists—not merely “one of” the most scarce.

According to data published in the *2015 China Health Statistical Yearbook*, the total number of pediatricians in China decreased from 105,000 to 100,000 over the past five years, resulting in an average of only 0.43 pediatricians per 1,000 children. This figure falls far short of the national average of 2.06 physicians per 1,000 population.

Pediatrics is truly a “value depression” in the healthcare sector. Not only is the number of pediatric-specific drugs alarmingly low, but since 1999, most medical schools in China have discontinued undergraduate programs in pediatrics, with only a handful of institutions still enrolling students in this specialty. Data indicates that China faces a shortfall of 200,000 pediatricians.

Previously, the Eastern Campus of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, the only Grade 3A hospital in Huangpu District, Guangzhou, announced that it would suspend overnight pediatric emergency services after 23:00 starting from October 13, admitting only critically ill children. This decision was due to a shortage of pediatricians; reports indicated that the hospital’s pediatrics department had failed to recruit a single physician over the past two years, while many doctors left for private medical institutions.

The state has recognized the bottlenecks in the development of pediatric healthcare. Recent policies mandate that, by 2020, the target of having 0.69 practicing pediatricians (including assistant physicians) per 1,000 children be achieved, which requires an increase of 36,000 pediatricians. To attain this goal, efforts to expand the pediatric workforce should be advanced through three avenues: training in higher education institutions, standardized residency training, and job transition programs for existing physicians moving into pediatrics.

Currently, AiBeier Yi has assembled dozens of authoritative pediatric experts and established specialized academic groups based on different disciplines. Top-tier experts within these groups develop systematic, multi-level training curricula for their respective fields. Professional teams record video courses featuring these experts, enabling physicians at all levels—particularly those in primary care settings—to access and study the content on the AiBeier Yi platform free of charge. Additionally, to meet the continuing medical education (CME) needs of pediatricians transitioning from other specialties, AiBeier Yi collaborates with institutions such as second- and third-tier CME colleges. Given the challenges of sustaining long-term, in-person lectures by experts in these regions, expert-led video courses serve as a valuable supplement to the educational offerings provided by CME institutions.

According to Yang Huiru, in order to maintain continuous control over the company’s development trajectory and direction, ensuring that its growth proceeds steadily and solidly in accordance with her own strategic vision, the company has not accepted funding from venture capital firms to date, relying primarily on self-funded capital. It is understood that the company is currently preparing to accept investment from an institution with a background in industrial operations. Yang Huiru stated that this investment is not merely financial in nature; rather, leveraging the investor’s mature knowledge management system and extensive experience in building knowledge product ecosystems, it will help Aibeier Yi (iBaby Medical) develop a specialized curriculum system for pediatrics and obstetrics. This strategic alignment constitutes the key factor behind bringing this entity on board as an investor.

According to Yang Huiru, the WeChat-based services of Aibeier Medical were officially launched in March. Its core positioning is to enable authoritative experts with extensive clinical experience to provide grassroots pediatricians with training in professional clinical knowledge and skills guidance through the platform. With virtually no marketing promotion, relying solely on the appeal of knowledge transfer from these experts, it has already amassed over 15,000 pediatrician users, covering 326 cities across China.

Wang Guanlin, Vice President of iBaby Medical, also introduced the company’s two newly launched APP products during the conference.

One highlight is the “Ai Bei Er Yi” app, launched in August, which has enhanced functionalities across several areas: first, it facilitates physicians in building their own follower base; second, it supports real-time chat via voice and images, enabling more professional communication between specialists and physicians, as well as among physicians; third, physicians can independently create discussion groups and academic forums on the platform, thereby fostering focused discussions on specialized topics, with features for secure archiving and quick search to establish a professional exchange platform for physicians; additionally, it supports multi-device synchronization to better accommodate user preferences.

Another product is “AiBei Follow-up,” launched in October, which primarily assists physicians in managing patients more effectively. It advocates for full-pathway medical and nursing services to achieve an integrated healthcare model centered on prevention, spanning the pre-diagnosis, intra-diagnosis, and post-diagnosis stages.

Although reluctant to elaborate on the path to commercialization at present, Yang Huiru revealed that the company is already planning multiple knowledge-based and commercial products. Looking ahead, Yang Huiru hopes that Aibeier Yi will become the largest platform for learning, social networking, and follow-up consultations among obstetricians and pediatricians, and grow into China’s largest group of obstetric and pediatric physicians.