YiHu Doctor Featured on CCTV's 'Focus Talk': Addressing Healthcare Access Through Innovation Amid IPO Filing
Mobile healthcare has recently gained extraordinary momentum. Apps that enable appointment scheduling and add-on registrations, represented by “1hu Doctor,” have made a meteoric rise within just one month, appearing on local television stations, CCTV News, and even the program “Focus Interview.”
On March 28, CCTV’s “Focus Interview” program aired a report on the appointment-adding services provided by mobile healthcare companies. The episode detailed the registration process offered by these mobile health platforms and compared it with the experience of registering directly at hospital windows, as permitted under current policies, putting forward the following core viewpoint:
1. There is a practical demand for "additional appointments" (jiahao) during the medical consultation process: on one hand, patients struggle to secure appointments despite their need for care; on the other hand, physicians seek to increase their income and demonstrate their professional value. Implementing a blanket policy to abolish additional appointments would indeed cause significant inconvenience to both patients and healthcare providers.
2. How to flexibly provide doctors with the capacity to accept additional appointments while effectively regulating such practices also tests the management capabilities of relevant authorities and major hospitals.
3. To address the issue of unauthorized appointment additions, it is necessary not only to standardize physicians’ practices in this regard but also to integrate these efforts with broader healthcare reforms. By combining such measures with the establishment of a tiered diagnosis and treatment system and the promotion of multi-site practice for physicians, medical resources can be fundamentally optimized, supply and demand between patients and providers balanced, high-quality care delivered to patients, and higher incomes secured for physicians.
In fact, the appointment registration services provided by mobile health companies have indeed addressed certain challenges for both patients and physicians, which can be analyzed from the perspectives of patients and doctors, respectively.
From the Patient’s Perspective: Mobile Health and Public Platforms Should Complement Each Other
Why Do Patients Prefer Mobile Health Apps? Because, in reality, mobile health has become virtually the only efficient supplementary method for appointment scheduling. It effectively addresses the urgent need for patients to secure registrations quickly and efficiently, proving both useful and effective.
Yet this approach has drawn criticism. It inevitably recalls the situation several years ago when major hospitals introduced “special-needs registration” slots priced at hundreds of yuan each: at that time, the media launched fervent critiques and raised a false dichotomy—if all doctors see patients through these expensive appointments, who will take care of those with standard registrations?
However, years have passed, and regular outpatient appointments have not disappeared; meanwhile, special-needs outpatient appointments have become an officially highly recognized method of “using market-based mechanisms to regulate medical resources.” Online appointment add-ons are, without doubt, the unofficial counterpart of special-needs outpatient appointments.
Within the existing system, mobile health enterprises possess the strongest impetus for reform. This is simply because their survival depends on market acceptance; consequently, the only viable strategy is to maximize the fulfillment of consumer demands, which leads them to prioritize patient interests.
Another reason for the low satisfaction with traditional appointment allocation methods is that all public or officially backed registration platforms allocate diagnostic and treatment resources only within hospital working hours. No matter how these resources are segmented, the total number of available appointments remains fixed, with their potential fully exhausted. In contrast, mobile healthcare facilitates doctors in seeing additional patients during their spare time, thereby providing incremental appointment slots, which makes the process appear more efficient.
"Of course, public platforms provide the vast majority of appointment slots, but mobile health has mobilized the enthusiasm of doctors who are beyond the reach of public platforms; the two should complement each other."
From the Physician’s Perspective: Mobile Health Enhances the Efficiency of Physicians’ Incremental Labor
In many reports, doctors are explicitly or implicitly accused of “colluding” with mobile health platforms, portraying them as having ambiguous integrity and being driven by greed.
Is this fair? In fact, even reports by China Central Television (CCTV) have noted that many doctors do not reject mobile healthcare. On the contrary, a physician with over 50 years of clinical experience wrote an article stating that the decision to add appointment slots should remain a matter between doctors and patients. He argued that adding appointment slots is within physicians’ discretion, reflecting their flexible assessment of patients’ conditions and responsible judgment based on those conditions—including the urgency of the need for medical assistance.
We have no reason to doubt that the majority of physicians offer additional appointment slots primarily to provide better care for patients. Moreover, the decision to open these additional slots can be made by physicians based on actual circumstances. Currently, all online requests for additional appointments require the submission of patient information for physician review, a procedure that is not required for in-person additional appointments at public hospitals. This detail strongly suggests that physicians offering online additional appointments are not motivated primarily, if at all, by financial gain, but rather by a desire to provide better medical assistance to patients in greater need.
Individual doctors may seem insignificant, but their kindness should not be underestimated. Take a doctor at PLA General Hospital (301 Hospital) as an example: they first inquire about the patient’s condition, then ask whether the patient has come from out of town, and further assess the urgency of the situation before deciding whether to grant an additional appointment slot. Such responsible physicians constitute the majority among those who provide additional appointments.
The difference is that, in the past, physicians could only add appointments for acquaintances nearby, long-standing patients, or those who inadvertently entered the consultation room. Now, with online appointment additions, the incremental workload of physicians can be distributed to as many people as possible in an equitable and efficient manner.
Give Innovation Enough Space
Currently, the "Notice" issued by the Beijing Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission remains the only written official document attempting to define such conduct.
The document's core stance: Doctors "must not collaborate with commercial platforms to obtain illegitimate benefits."
Although most companies, including 1hu Doctor, have adjusted their business models and pledged to operate within the framework of this document, does this regulation truly maximize the space for innovation?
In fact, online appointment add-ons are an innovative attempt to reasonably address existing problems by leveraging advanced technologies in the “Internet+” environment, representing a solution that maximizes efficiency for patients, physicians, and administrators alike.
It requires the support of two elements:
It is most efficient for physicians to engage in multi-site practice by consulting with online patients from their own offices. This is particularly relevant in major cities like Beijing, where it is impractical for doctors to spend two hours commuting for just one hour of voluntary overtime work.
Doctors arranging their own labor during their spare time, regardless of the platform they collaborate with, should not be defined as "unjust enrichment."
However, the challenge lies in the widespread perception that when physicians accept additional appointments in their offices, they are “colluding” with mobile health platforms. Although hospital administrators are well aware that this approach is the most efficient and conserves physicians’ time and energy, another difficulty arises: just as the scope of physicians’ services has significantly expanded with the integration of mobile platforms, such services have suddenly been halted.
In fact, as long as mobile health initiatives are guided by the principle of maximizing patient benefits, they should receive corresponding policy encouragement and support. We should focus more on new methods that practically solve problems, rather than merely examining the problems themselves.
Note: This article is a reader submission.
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Appendix: Statement from 1hu Doctor: All our efforts are dedicated to addressing the difficulty of accessing medical care.
Yihu Doctor has taken note of tonight’s (March 28, 2016) coverage on CCTV’s “Focus Interview” program regarding Yihu Doctor and the mobile healthcare industry. Our statement is as follows:
1. 1hu Doctor firmly supports and welcomes the continued reporting and oversight of the mobile healthcare industry by well-known media outlets such as CCTV.
2. There is a “time lag” between the sources used in relevant reports and the actual facts. We have found that these reports are based on outdated materials. In fact, after the Beijing Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission issued the Notice on Regulating Online Appointments in mid-March, 1hu Doctor responded proactively by implementing significant version upgrades and operational adjustments. Our services now fully comply with the requirements set forth in the Notice. Therefore, we welcome further media interviews to enable more comprehensive and accurate coverage of 1hu Doctor. We also hope to engage in full communication with industry regulators and news media, and to exchange views extensively on the development of mobile healthcare.
3. All our efforts are dedicated to addressing the challenge of "difficult access to medical care." We are committed to fundamentally making healthcare more accessible and seamless by promoting multi-site practice, developing online consultations, and diversifying doctor-patient communication channels. Regardless of the challenges we face, our original aspiration remains unwavering.
4. 1hu Doctor is the natural enemy of appointment scalpers. By leveraging advanced mobile internet technologies, we are committed to eliminating information asymmetry and improving the supply structure of medical services, thereby fundamentally resolving this challenge.
5. We wish to convey to all our industry peers that our common enemy is not each other, but rather the deep-seated structural ailments of the healthcare sector and the significant challenges patients face in accessing medical care. Let us unite in sincerity and join forces to expedite solutions to the difficulty of seeking medical attention, thereby promoting public health and well-being.
Yihu Doctor