Quyi Unveils Strategic Upgrade of 'Hospital+' Platform to Build an Open Internet Healthcare Ecosystem

At the 2016 Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC 2016), Quyi Network announced a comprehensive upgrade of its core platform product, the “Hospital+” platform. This upgrade facilitates secure and rapid deep integration of third-party services with healthcare institutions, fostering an open internet healthcare ecosystem. It helps integrate the entire medical service chain, ultimately establishing a new industrial ecosystem centered on hospitals, patients, and third-party service providers.

VCBeat conducted an exclusive interview with Zhang Zhenhua, Vice President of Quyi Network and CEO of Quhu Network, regarding this strategy. Zhang told VCBeat, “As a standardized and normalized platform, the ‘Hospital+’ platform serves as a unified interface for achieving deep direct connectivity and bidirectional real-time transactions with hospitals.” Through its own adaptation layer, the “Hospital+” platform can stably integrate with various business systems while appropriately encapsulating and unifying diverse medical information services. Currently, the “Hospital+” platform has established a three-tier internet healthcare ecosystem comprising the platform layer, the application layer, and physical medical institutions. In this way, the “Hospital+” platform acts as a bridge facilitating interconnectivity between hospitals and patients, as well as between hospitals and third-party service providers.

According to Quyi Network’s plan, the “Hospital+” platform aimed to build 20 regional smart healthcare platforms in 2016, connecting 3,000 hospitals at or above the secondary level and covering 70% of tertiary hospitals across China. The plan also included onboarding 100 third-party service providers to support a wide range of applications, including medical services, insurance claims processing, pharmaceutical e-commerce, and financial payment solutions.

Quyi Network “Hospital+” Platform Schematic Diagram

Platform Layer: Connecting Healthcare Institutions and Users

Among these, the “Hospital+” platform at the platform layer serves as the “heart.” It deeply integrates with physical healthcare institutions such as hospitals, health and family planning commissions, and medical insurance systems, enabling bidirectional real-time information exchange. By providing more authoritative and professional platform services, it establishes a unified mobile internet entry point for healthcare institutions, facilitating their rapid integration into the new internet ecosystem and accelerating the transformation of their internet-based service models.

Meanwhile, the “Hospital+” platform also establishes interconnectivity with all application services at the application layer, facilitating seamless integration of numerous internet-based healthcare applications into medical institutions and fostering an ecosystem for internet healthcare.

The “Hospital+” platform hosts Quyi Network’s two core consumer-facing product lines: the “Qu Hospital” App and the “Quyi Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform.” The “Qu Hospital” App is a mobile internet-based healthcare service that provides patients with one-stop, end-to-end medical services, including appointment scheduling, registration, queue management, payment, and access to laboratory and diagnostic test reports. Centered on referral services, the “Quyi Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform” enables physicians to perform referral and consultation operations anytime and anywhere, facilitating business collaboration and information sharing among medical institutions.

The most typical third-party application is the “Xiaoqu Good Nurse” app. As an internally incubated project of the Quyi Network platform and a key component of the “Hospital+” strategy, the “Xiaoqu Good Nurse” app connects with the “Hospital+” platform to provide medical escort services to the public.

Since its launch in March, Quyi’s medical accompaniment service has onboarded nearly 300 contracted nurses and now covers almost 150 public hospitals at the secondary level or above in Beijing. Starting in May, it will gradually extend its coverage to all public hospitals above the community level. In addition to Beijing, the medical accompaniment services at public hospitals in Wuhan, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other cities are expected to go live within the year. Regarding the highly anticipated appointment registration service, it is understood that integration with the “Qu Hospital” App will be completed shortly. Users will then be able to access appointment registration, laboratory report inquiries, medical accompaniment, and other services through the “Xiaoqu Good Nurse” App, thereby providing greater convenience for patients seeking medical care.

Zhang Zhenhua, Vice President of Quyi Network and CEO of Quhu Network, also revealed that Quhu Network plans to launch its first round of financing in the near future.

Application Layer: A Key Channel for Seamless Integration of Third-Party Services into Healthcare Institutions

Supported by the “Hospital+” platform, the application layer can be opened to third-party service providers, enabling interoperability between platform-based application services and insurance institutions, pharmaceutical e-commerce platforms, upstream and downstream suppliers, and third-party apps. By integrating with this platform, pharmaceutical e-commerce companies can facilitate online medication purchases for patients, while commercial insurance companies can streamline online claims processing for policyholders.

As an open platform, the “Hospital+” platform serves as a vital channel for third-party services to seamlessly integrate with healthcare institutions. By facilitating connections with more third-party platforms, “Hospital+” enables numerous internet healthcare applications to securely and conveniently interface with healthcare institutions. This helps significantly reduce the costs of delivering internet-based medical services to healthcare providers and patients, thereby driving the digital transformation of their business models.

To facilitate integration with third-party systems, the “Hospital+” platform features remote development guidance capabilities. It offers comprehensive development and debugging support through online documentation, online tools, and other means, providing services such as remote business guidance and parameter configuration instructions. This ensures high-quality integration while significantly reducing the complexity of system interoperability.

The “Hospital+” platform features business management capabilities, providing third parties with services such as online data viewing, data analysis, early warning alerts, and anomaly notifications, thereby helping integrated partners better utilize our services after onboarding.

To meet the personalized needs of third parties, the "Hospital+" platform supports customized development, allowing third parties to tailor solutions on demand.

In terms of deployment architecture, the service-oriented modularization of the “Hospital+” platform enables flexible upgrades and configuration management. This includes capabilities such as hot upgrades and real-time configuration changes, ensuring uninterrupted 24/7 service availability.

Front-end Adaptation Layer: Helping Healthcare Institutions Transform Traditional Care Delivery Models

Supported by the platform and application layers, Quyi Network helps physical medical institutions transform traditional healthcare delivery models, rapidly integrate into the new internet ecosystem, revolutionize medical processes, and facilitate the implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment.

In response to the National Health and Family Planning Commission’s mandate for the comprehensive implementation of appointment-based diagnosis and treatment, the “Hospital+” platform has established a unified appointment slot management model during this upgrade. This enables the “Hospital+” platform not only to integrate with in-hospital Hospital Information Systems (HIS) for rational management of all internal appointment slots, but also to connect with third-party platforms, providing personalized appointment slot management services. Guided by the requirements for patient appointment registration, physician schedule inquiries, department information queries, and appointment cancellations, the platform supports flexible configuration of appointment rules, thereby assisting hospitals in implementing time-slot-based appointments.

Furthermore, the “Hospital+” platform has established reasonable rules for appointment registration. For instance, it implements unified management of appointments through measures such as a blacklist and whitelist system for users who repeatedly book but fail to attend their consultations, thereby ensuring the stability of appointment slots and safeguarding patients’ fundamental interests.

It is reported that the “Hospital+” platform has currently integrated with more than 30 third-party service providers, including medical service applications such as Baidu Doctor and Ping An Good Doctor, insurance claims platforms like Pacific Insurance, financial payment applications such as China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, and Bestpay, as well as online travel websites like Qunar.

Trinity: Enhancing Overall Service Processing Capabilities

To ensure the smooth operation of critical “Hospital+” business services, the “Hospital+” platform employs a distributed asynchronous message queue to reduce business waiting times. Additionally, it adopts a service-oriented distributed architecture that decomposes systems into modular service components. Each type of component is dedicated to handling a specific category of business functions and operates with multiple running instances. This design not only prevents potential single points of failure but also enhances the overall processing capacity of each service by scaling up the number of running instances.

In addition, the “Hospital+” platform also adopts the following measures to strengthen protection:

• Use the online replay system to trace request sources, parameters, and results, facilitating the reproduction of user operations and ensuring continuous and stable system operation;




• By leveraging the second-level synchronization mechanism between the database’s read and write instances, all modifications to the write instance are immediately synchronized to the read instance, thereby enhancing database application performance.




• Zookeeper is used for cluster coordination services, establishing robust fault tolerance mechanisms for network and node failures. The downtime of a single instance has minimal impact on such services. If a service goes down, other components can quickly receive notifications within 30 seconds and stop routing traffic to that instance.

In terms of system security, the “Hospital+” platform has also implemented multiple firewalls: isolation between internal and external networks, channel encryption, encryption of personal privacy data, and interception of malicious attacks.

According to the assessment, the primary load on the “Hospital+” platform stems from user-related requests rather than resource-related requests. Therefore, in terms of service processing, the “Hospital+” platform routes user-related data to business service partitions for handling, while hospital-related data—such as configurations, department information, and appointment slots—are processed by a centralized public data center. The business service partitions can be scaled horizontally by region, whereas there is only one instance of the public data center, thereby maximizing information security.

Furthermore, to ensure the secure and stable operation of integrated third-party systems, the “Hospital+” platform manages the identities of all accessing parties, thereby enhancing the standardization and security of system integration.

Since its launch in May 2014, the “Hospital+” platform has cumulatively connected more than 1,500 public hospitals, including over 1,000 hospitals with deep direct integration, covering 27 provinces and municipalities across China. Meanwhile, the number of connected public hospitals is rapidly increasing at a rate of more than 150 per month. Among these connected institutions, secondary-tier and above hospitals account for 98.6% of the total, while tertiary-tier and above hospitals constitute 51%.

Case: The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University’s “Quyi” Journey

In leveraging “Internet+” to optimize healthcare processes, the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University (hereinafter referred to as “Wenzhou Medical University First Affiliated Hospital”) has emerged as a pioneer. Not long ago, the hospital launched the “Qu Yiyuan” App, the “Quyi Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform,” and the “Quyi Online Hospital.”

At the 2016 China Hospital Internet Healthcare Conference, Chen Xiaoming, President of The First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, stated that thanks to process reengineering, the development of information technology infrastructure, and the improvement of service models, the hospital’s outpatient volume approached 4 million annually, yet its outpatient halls remained free from severe congestion.

This is attributable to the hospital’s implementation of multi-channel appointment systems, including self-service kiosks, Alipay, and WeChat. Among these, “Qu Yiyuan” (Fun Hospital), one of Quyi Network’s core consumer-facing products, enables patients to schedule appointments, access laboratory and imaging reports, and check their medical card balances via mobile devices.

To further enhance patient experience, the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University leveraged its high-quality medical resources and fully utilized the integration, security, advanced nature, and openness of its information system platform. By combining its mobile outpatient services, out-of-hospital medical care system, and desktop cloud system, the hospital formed a strong partnership with Quyi Network, which boasts medical IT service capabilities and unified platform expertise. Through complementary strengths, the two parties jointly developed the “Quyi Online Hospital” and the “Quyi Tiered Diagnosis and Treatment Platform.” These platforms commenced trial operations on March 15 and were officially launched on March 26, thereby enabling high-quality online medical services, remote consultations, and tiered diagnosis and treatment.

Specifically, how does Quyi’s “Hospital+” platform operate? Zhang Zhenhua explained the mechanism to VCBeat using the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University as an example. “In our collaboration with the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, the hospital sets up an online consultation room within its facility. Patients can book appointments for this clinic through standard online registration systems. In this way, general practitioners or specialists at the hospital conduct video consultations with patients, and subsequently issue prescriptions via the Quyi platform.” Once the prescription is issued, medication delivery is completed through application-layer partners such as 111.com (Yiyaowang) or Haoyaoshi.

According to Quyi Network’s plan, the “Hospital+” platform aims to build 20 regional smart healthcare platforms in 2016, connecting 3,000 hospitals at or above the secondary level and covering 70% of tertiary hospitals across China. It also plans to onboard 100 third-party service providers, offering applications spanning medical services, insurance claims processing, pharmaceutical e-commerce, and financial payment solutions.