Kingdee Healthcare CEO Chen Dengkun Outlines Plan to Connect 1,000 Mobile Internet Hospitals Within Three Years

At the 2016 reMED Summit on Reconstructing the Healthcare Ecosystem, Chen Dengkun, Executive Director and Senior Vice President of Kingdee Group and General Manager of Kingdee Medical, delivered a keynote speech titled “Mobile Internet Hospitals: Reconstructing Trustworthy Healthcare Services.” VCBeat has compiled the key highlights from his presentation.

Many internet healthcare companies emphasize disruptive innovation, but Chen Dengkun believes that inheritance-based innovation is more important in the medical industry.

Chen Dengkun offers three insights into the development trends of the healthcare industry: First, hospitals will always remain the mainstay of healthcare delivery, as they are and will continue to be the primary providers of medical services. Second, the essence of hospitals can be distilled into one word: trust. Internet-based innovations anchored by hospitals are better positioned to earn patients’ trust. Third, internet healthcare does not equate to free services; rather, it should leverage internet technologies in collaboration with hospitals to provide patients with value-added services and specialized health management solutions.

Chen Dengkun

The Essence of Healthcare Is Connecting Supply and Demand

The essence of healthcare lies in connecting supply with demand: supply influences pricing, while demand fosters trust. Although medical prices are regulated by the state, trust must be cultivated over time. Therefore, Kingdee’s deployment of internet hospitals must effectively connect supply and demand to build trust between doctors and patients.

Why do patients prefer large hospitals over smaller ones or community clinics? It is not merely a matter of cost; trust plays a more critical role. Supply-side reforms in healthcare aim to increase the number of physicians and medical equipment. However, since a significant portion of patient demand is concentrated in large hospitals, even substantial expansion of hospital infrastructure by the state cannot fully meet this demand. Kingdee Healthcare seeks to reduce illness incidence and promote wellness. Its specific approach involves connecting patients with physicians during their health journeys, thereby laying the foundation for subsequent health management services.

Achieving this goal means that Kingdee Healthcare must assist hospitals in their digital transformation.

The specific transformation involves three aspects: first, technological transformation; second, managerial transformation; and third, service transformation. Among these, the most urgent is service transformation, aimed at improving patient services. Enhancing services must be supported by information technology.

Currently, major hospitals across China have their own information systems, but two critical issues remain unresolved: first, patients are unfamiliar with these hospital information systems; second, hospital presidents do not use them. Kingdee Healthcare aims to leverage its 30 years of experience in hospital informatization to address these two challenges by connecting patients and hospital presidents through digital solutions.

Kingdee Healthcare aims to establish two platforms: a patient mobile service platform that connects hospitals with patients, enabling patient participation in the care process and providing additional value-added and health services; and a hospital mobile work platform that engages healthcare professionals and hospital administrators. The next phase involves building a big data-enabled cloud hospital to deliver remote diagnosis and treatment services through cloud platforms and cloud-based hospital infrastructure.

Currently, Kingdee already serves 300 mobile internet hospitals and plans to connect with 1,000 such facilities within three years.

China has 26,000 hospitals, with fewer than 2,000 classified as Grade A tertiary hospitals. Yet these 2,000 hospitals deliver 60% of medical services. Only by optimizing this 60% share, enhancing efficiency, and establishing a tiered diagnosis and treatment system can we better serve patients. Kingdee Healthcare lowers the barrier for patient participation in healthcare informatization through its cloud-based and open platforms.

Kingdee Medical's Four Differentiated Competitive Advantages

Whether in e-commerce or with today’s Didi Chuxing, the internet connects suppliers through free competition. For instance, restaurants, drivers, and retail stores all operate in a freely competitive market. However, unlike these sectors, the supply side of internet-based healthcare is not governed by free competition but is instead subject to administrative control. Given this characteristic, internet healthcare must prioritize offline resources; relying solely on online platforms is not a viable path.

Therefore, Kingdee Healthcare adheres to an integrated online-to-offline (O2O) model. Chen Dengkun believes that the most critical element in O2O is the “O2,” which signifies that establishing seamless end-to-end process integration is paramount.

Kingdee focuses on two core activities online: leveraging the Internet to enable remote diagnosis and treatment, thereby enhancing hospital efficiency and improving patients’ service experience.

Three aspects are crucial in healthcare services: First, trust-based service; no other sector places greater emphasis on trust than healthcare. Second, localization. Many platforms claim to have integrated with thousands of hospitals, yet this holds little significance for a large number of patients, as they prioritize localized services. Third, administrative management must focus on the integration of offline resources.

What sets Kingdee Healthcare apart from other companies is its possession of core technologies, upon which it builds connectors for healthcare services to openly and securely link all hospitals and patients. In the first half of this year, many airlines announced their intention to establish direct connections with their customers, reflecting a future trend. Hospitals likewise need to connect directly with their patients. When a hospital connects with one million users and patients, it becomes a substantial online market in its own right, enabling Kingdee Healthcare to deliver a wide range of vertical services.

Kingdee Medical’s second advantage is providing a unified and secure peripheral access point. The third advantage is offering end-to-end information connectivity technology. Kingdee Medical enables users to achieve seamless integration across the entire workflow, from in-hospital to out-of-hospital settings, and from capital flows to information flows. Fourth, Kingdee Medical currently facilitates the highest volume of hospital payment transactions. To date, Kingdee Medical has amassed over 4 million users and processed 7 million payments.

Three Major Trends in Mobile Internet Hospitals

Chen Dengkun predicts that mobile internet hospitals will exhibit three major trends: First, mobile internet hospitals will gradually evolve into cloud hospitals, becoming remote diagnosis and treatment platforms. Currently, they merely connect traditional medical services and optimize offline service processes; in the future, they will directly provide platforms on the mobile internet for patients to consult doctors and for doctors to deliver diagnosis and treatment.

Second, mobile internet hospitals will evolve into tiered diagnosis and treatment platforms. By first connecting large tertiary Grade A hospitals via the mobile internet and then integrating secondary hospitals and community health centers through medical consortia, they will transform into regional mobile healthcare service platforms.

The third trend is the genuine transformation from a medical care provider to a health services platform. Medical care is not the end goal but merely a means; health is the ultimate objective. While today’s hospitals are treatment-centric, future hospitals will focus on prevention and rehabilitation. Therefore, integrating prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation into a comprehensive, full-lifecycle health and medical platform represents the future development direction of Kingdee Healthcare.

Based on this, Kingdee Healthcare has two aspects to its future business planning:

1) Establish a regional mobile healthcare service platform to create a unified, shared pool of physician resources, schedules, and appointment slots, thereby building a cloud-based shared service platform. Patients can select appropriate medical services through technological means. For instance, price information and medical evaluation data can guide patients to choose nearby healthcare institutions that match their specific conditions. This approach aims to achieve the goal of tiered diagnosis and treatment, rather than relying solely on administrative measures.

2) Tiered diagnosis and treatment platforms and health service platforms: Mobile internet hospitals assist healthcare institutions in first integrating their existing service workflows, and subsequently enable more hospitals to implement online consultations and guide patients through the tiered diagnosis and treatment system, thereby establishing a genuine internet-based medical consortium and tiered care service framework.