Ping An Good Doctor: Building a User-Centric Digital Healthcare Ecosystem

Backed by Ping An Insurance, the industry leader, Ping An Good Doctor is a star product in the internet healthcare sector. Following its Series A financing round, Ping An Good Doctor’s valuation reached $3 billion, establishing it as an industry frontrunner. However, within the broader mobile digital health landscape, Ping An Good Doctor entered the market relatively late: it was founded in August 2014, and its app was launched in April 2015, with a press conference held in Beijing to mark the occasion.

Despite the “golden shield” of internet medical insurance, Ping An Good Doctor has remained in the exploratory phase of its business model over the past year or so. It has ultimately crystallized into a core philosophy: at the heart of internet-based healthcare lies medicine itself; at the heart of medicine are physicians; and at the heart of physician practice is service. Today, VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) provides a detailed analysis of Ping An Good Doctor’s user ecosystem. Below are the highlights curated by our editorial team.

In the future landscape of internet healthcare, there will undoubtedly emerge a company with a market capitalization of $100 billion. This company will not operate within a single vertical sector but will instead possess a vast ecosystem. Within this ecosystem, services from various verticals will be organically integrated with the platform to collectively meet user needs. Ping An Good Doctor is positioned precisely to build such a health ecosystem for internet healthcare. This ecosystem is not limited to Ping An Good Doctor as a single enterprise but functions as an open platform.

From the user’s perspective, an app that offers only limited services will not be allowed to occupy a permanent spot on the smartphone home screen. For app providers, services that involve only a few interactions per year are difficult to monetize. Therefore, the future may look like this: each vertical sector is relatively low-frequency, but the reuse of N such low-frequency scenarios becomes high-frequency. The longer an app occupies users’ time, the more services it provides, and consequently, the greater its business overlap with users. This is the simple logic of the internet.

On December 18, 2013, two founding employees of Ping An Good Doctor joined the Ping An Group to oversee two strategic businesses for the company’s future: financial management and health management. These two individuals spearheaded Ping An’s major health strategy until Ping An Health Internet Co., Ltd. was officially registered in August 2014. One month after the app’s launch in April 2015, the Ping An Good Doctor app achieved the highest penetration rate among similar products in the mobile market. By March 2016, it ranked first among peer applications across all mobile app markets. As of June 2016, Ping An Good Doctor had accumulated over 80 million registered users and handled 250,000 daily consultations, placing it among China’s Top 50 Most Active Apps.

According to Deng Yuande, Senior Director at Ping An Good Doctor, who revealed at the 2016 Internet Innovation in Healthcare Forum, Ping An Good Doctor currently employs over 1,000 full-time consulting physicians and collaborates with more than 50,000 external doctors. The company has also established partnerships with over 3,000 hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies, as well as more than 500 affiliated health examination centers. Currently, the platform’s daily peak consultation volume reaches 250,000, equivalent to the capacity of 20 Grade A tertiary hospitals.

In March 2016, Ping An Good Doctor ranked 41st in daily active users (DAU) among all mobile applications, with WeChat ranking first. Preceding Ping An Good Doctor was Le.com Video, which reported annual revenue of over RMB 2 billion in the previous year.

It was revealed that 59% of the users on the Ping An Good Doctor platform are female, with 81% being married and having children, 46% coming from three-person households, and 20% aged between 41 and 45. This indicates that women demonstrate the highest level of attention to family health, often bearing the responsibility of caring for both elderly parents and young children.

Meanwhile, the age distribution of users is markedly different from that of other applications. While most apps have a majority of users under 30, Ping An Good Doctor presents the opposite pattern: only 10% of its users are under 26 years old, whereas 80% are aged 26 and above, with a highly even distribution across each age bracket within this group. Among active users by city, northern cities account for a relatively high proportion, with the top four all being located in northern China.

In April this year, Ping An Good Doctor completed a $500 million Series A financing round, reaching a valuation of $3 billion. This single financing deal set a new industry record. Ping An Good Doctor will further build the next-generation healthcare ecosystem, ultimately forming a closed loop. Following the success of the Series A financing, Ping An Good Doctor established a Good Doctor Ecosystem Incubation Fund. In the future, it will invest in six key areas, including service providers in specialized medical fields, individual doctor clinics, companies with health big data and health traffic, manufacturers of smart medical devices, pharmaceutical companies, and offline hospitals and clinics.

Ping An Good Doctor defines its more than 1,000 full-time physicians as “family doctors,” providing online health management and consultation services. Currently, the doctor-to-patient ratio is severely inverted. While the Ping An Good Doctor platform can deliver services, standardization cannot be achieved without proprietary physician resources. Non-standardized products are difficult to commercialize, as users are unlikely to pay solely for personalized services. Moreover, the nature of internet platforms aligns with a “grassroots economy,” expanding from rural areas to urban centers.

Meanwhile, the Ping An Good Doctor platform has opened up a new career pathway for physicians. For instance, while programmers once prioritized obtaining state-issued certifications at various levels as part of their career planning, they now focus less on credentialing and more on capturing corporate benefits. The future for physicians will follow a similar trajectory, evolving fully in line with market forces, where professional service capabilities become the key driver for better career development.

Users consulting doctors on the Ping An Good Doctor platform may only receive general advice and recommendations, as physicians cannot provide in-depth diagnoses without access to patients’ pathological data. Achieving a truly professional diagnosis requires obtaining pathology reports; however, hospitals cannot be relied upon for this data, so patients must take the initiative to secure it themselves. With the advancement of intelligent medical hardware, 60%–70% of symptoms can be assessed through routine outpatient visits combined with basic blood and urine tests at hospitals, and this portion of diagnostic capability can be realized using intelligent medical devices.

Not long ago, Ping An Good Doctor piloted its “Health at Home” community-based service in Guangzhou. Users can consult doctors on the Ping An Good Doctor platform; if further diagnosis cannot be made online, the doctor will recommend either registering for an in-person visit at a partner hospital or opting for Ping An Good Doctor’s one-hour home sample collection service for tests such as complete blood count (CBC) and urinalysis. Test results are available within half an hour after sample collection and are automatically uploaded to the cloud, where professional physicians review the reports and provide further management recommendations. Finally, to address medication needs, users can access pharmaceutical services through B2C e-commerce platforms, O2O platforms, and offline hospital-based channels.

Therefore, such big data must be acquired from patients across multiple scenarios, and patient data can only generate value when leveraged through physicians’ services. Undoubtedly, Ping An Good Doctor aims to establish such a closed-loop ecosystem.

In China, many people are unclear about the anatomical locations of vital organs such as the heart, liver, spleen, stomach, and kidneys, making patient education a significant challenge. Therefore, in addition to providing medical services, Ping An Good Doctor is also working to popularize professional health knowledge and promote disease prevention through expert physicians and live interactive sessions. For instance, in collaboration with Dr. Han Baoshan from Shanghai, the platform has hosted series focused on breast cancer prevention and treatment, each attracting over 100,000 online viewers and more than 3,000 questions.

In numerous third- and fourth-tier cities, residents lack access to such primary information as well as guidance from top-tier physicians in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. However, these individuals may be precisely targeted patients or potential patients, representing the most valuable patient population for healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies. Live interactive streaming can foster trust between users and physicians.

Furthermore, 90% of doctors in China still rely on hospital platforms and physician groups, lacking their own dedicated platforms. This live-streaming format can help establish a platform for physicians’ personal value; when a doctor accumulates over one million followers on the platform, they can fully build their own professional team. Just as doctors would never have dared to open private clinics before the advent of Weibo due to lack of public recognition, today’s “internet-famous” doctors are emboldened to take such risks. Meanwhile, hospitals can also leverage these “internet-famous” doctors and their intellectual property (IP) to enhance their brand value. From Ping An Good Doctor’s perspective, “health-focused live streaming” offers strong alignment with the interests of users, physicians, and healthcare institutions alike.

In addition to live-streaming content, Ping An Good Doctor is also popularizing health knowledge through its “Health Community,” producing medical and healthcare content in collaboration with professional medical institutions and healthcare practitioners. The application scenario can be described as follows: When a breast cancer patient is deciding whether to consult Dr. Han Baoshan or another physician, she does not make an immediate decision but engages in further evaluation. Generally, users’ purchase decision journeys are relatively lengthy; however, after leaving the live-streaming platform, where should she go to find Dr. Han Baoshan? And where can she conduct comparative assessments to inform her decision? Ping An Good Doctor’s “Health Community” provides such professional guidance services, featuring various specialized institutions that users can select from and compare, ultimately facilitating interaction.

Users in third- and fourth-tier cities constitute a large base with urgent healthcare needs, yet they lack access to high-quality medical resources and sufficient sharing of medical information, and even struggle to purchase many medications. Therefore, these users urgently need a dedicated channel, and establishing such a channel is one of the key priorities for Ping An Good Doctor’s next strategic deployment.

If an application is used by customers only two or three times a year, the enterprise will struggle to survive without external support, as it has weak self-sustaining revenue capabilities and lacks effective commercial channels. Therefore, Ping An Good Doctor aims to collaborate with partners in specialized fields to provide diversified services that meet user needs, acquire user data, integrate its products into users’ service radius, and enhance user stickiness to the platform, thereby generating more interaction opportunities. Meanwhile, Ping An Good Doctor seeks to build a healthcare ecosystem in which all participants fulfill their respective roles and obtain what they need, ultimately achieving a win-win outcome. This represents Ping An Good Doctor’s future strategic positioning.