PaiYiPai Acquires ePeizhen to Launch Franchise Model and Expand Integrated Medical Data Services

By Alice | Source: Xiao Fan Zhuo

Evening news on September 7: Paiyipai, a medical big data services company, has recently acquired e-Peizhen, a mobile healthcare O2O company. It is reported that Paiyipai is a high-tech internet healthcare startup specializing in medical intelligence. Founded two years ago, the company’s founder possesses leading domestic technological expertise and a strong medical background.

Wu Shizhan, Founder and CEO of Paiyipai, stated that through this acquisition, Paiyipai will fully support the future development of e-Peizhen (e-Escort), enabling a clear end-to-end patient journey scenario. Patients can book nurses from e-Peizhen to streamline unnecessary medical procedures; after receiving laboratory test results, they can obtain comprehensive big data analytics on their condition by simply taking a photo with their mobile phones. Additionally, post-consultation, patients can upload medical documents to insurance companies for expedited claims processing.

“Pai Yi Pai will next focus on enhancing its end-to-end services, including in-consultation accompaniment, intelligent interpretation of post-visit laboratory reports, and medical bill insurance claims, aiming to establish a closed-loop transaction system for healthcare big data.” Moving forward, e-Peizhen will appoint seasoned executives from well-known companies with extensive offline operational experience. It is certain that e-Peizhen is about toLaunch the city-level franchise model.This merger can be seen as the vanguard propelling mobile healthcare into the era of big data.

e-Pezhen was established in January 2015. In March, it received RMB 10 million in angel-round investment from Hongtai Fund. After nearly two years of development, the platform surpassed 100,000 users in areas such as pre-consultation appointment registration and medical accompaniment services, accumulated a pool of more than 1,700 part-time nurses, and launched the “Zaoyi Guahao” APP in 2016.

In late June 2016, Paiyipai and e-Peizhen began frequent discussions to enhance their offline business cooperation and gradually reached a consensus. Facilitated by investors, the founders of both companies expressed their intention to merge. On July 25, 2016, Yue Jianxiong, founder of e-Peizhen, stepped down from his position and simultaneously announced his appointment as Vice President at Ifeng.com. Subsequently, e-Peizhen entered into an acquisition process, with Paiyipai as the acquirer. On September 7, e-Peizhen launched its new business model.

It is understood that Pai Yi Pai is a high-tech internet healthcare company specializing in medical intelligence, offering a comprehensive platform that ranges from optical character recognition (OCR) for medical documents to the structured processing and intelligent interpretation of medical data. The company boasts China’s most accurate intelligent recognition system for medical documents; as early as 2015, its accuracy rate for single laboratory test reports reached 97%, representing the highest level in China. To date, the company holds more than 30 patented technologies in medical image recognition, making it the big data firm with the largest portfolio of such patents in the field.

▲ Paiyi Lab Test Report Interpretation Page

Yang Qiong, co-founder of Paiyipai, revealed that the future development of e-Peizhen (e-Companion Care) will not only focus on completing its franchise model and transaction loop but also leverage a portion of its medical consultation data for big data research on specialized diseases. This data will, to a certain extent, assist Paiyipai’s AI-driven medical intelligence in generating more efficient and accurate analytical insights, while also enhancing the precision and rapid development capabilities of its data services.

Yang Qiong stated that PaiyiPai has made significant progress in medical document recognition technology by leveraging the health data and insurance claims data accumulated on its platform, thereby delivering robust technical service capabilities in insurance claims processing partnerships.

Pai Yi Pai currently serves B2B clients with strong image recognition needs, including healthcare institutions, third-party medical service providers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and research organizations. It has established partnerships with numerous B2B clients such as Huadao Data, Dakang Medical, Baidu, and Ciming Health Checkup.

To adapt to the new demands of the healthcare market, Paiyipai established an independent subsidiary, Xinze Medical, this spring. Xinze Medical provides cloud-based Hospital Information System (HIS) solutions for emerging medical institutions and others. This means that emerging healthcare providers, which are more responsive to market changes, will be able to obtain high-quality, cost-effective IT tools tailored to their specific informatization needs. Currently, Xinze Medical has established deep collaborations with China’s largest hemodialysis center and a renowned brain hospital, among others, and has already achieved its profitability targets. By deeply penetrating the B2B market in the fields of nephrology and neurology, Xinze Medical is expected to achieve annual revenue in the tens of millions by the end of this year.

Another area of exploration is blockchain. The healthcare industry is currently plagued by large-scale data quality issues, which may stem from errors made by physicians or clinicians, cyberattacks, or failures to update identical electronic health records (EHRs) due to simultaneous editing. The issue of multiple vendors maintaining different versions of the same patient’s records is also occurring.

Therefore, medical records are far from being fully trustworthy. In the second half of 2015, the integration of blockchain technology with healthcare trust gained significant traction in the capital market. With various application scenarios—such as pharmaceutical and medical device tracking, mutual aid claims settlement, and health insurance platforms—blockchain has, in a sense, established itself as the most promising solution for addressing B-side users’ healthcare trust issues.

In July 2016, Paiyipai entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Taiyi Technology, a company specializing in blockchain technology, with the aim of leading the introduction of blockchain into the healthcare sector. By integrating this technology with artificial intelligence, they sought to apply it extensively to complex technical solutions such as ensuring medical information security, reducing industry risks, empowering patients to control their own health data and medical records, and auditing claims information.