Tencent Unveils 'TengAI Healthcare Strategy', WeChat Poised to Become Primary Healthcare Gateway
On March 25, Tencent held a press conference in Anshun, Guizhou, under the theme “Leveraging Internet Technology to Enhance Healthcare and Public Welfare Services.” In addition to announcing the achievements of the “Guizhou Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Plan” in collaboration with Guizhou Bailing Pharmaceutical and launching the app “Teng Ai Doctor,” which helps physicians build their personal brands, Tencent’s in-depth strategic layout in the internet healthcare sector was unveiled. The centerpiece of the event was the introduction of its “Teng Ai Healthcare” strategy.
Tencent Vice President Ding Ke
The Formation of the Guizhou Model
In November 2015, Suiyang County in Guizhou Province launched a pilot program for “Internet + Chronic Disease Management,” centered in Yangchuan Town. The Suiyang County Health and Family Planning Commission and the County Social Security Bureau invited patients with diabetes from Yangchuan Town to the Suiyang County Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital in batches, where endocrinologists provided education on diabetes knowledge and blood glucose control methods. It was found that the local prevalence of blood glucose meter ownership among patients was less than 40%. To address this, the Guizhou Provincial Health and Family Planning Commission partnered with well-known enterprises such as Tencent and Bailing to distribute blood glucose meters and test strips free of charge. More than 1,500 residents in Yangchuan Town have been equipped with Tang Daifu (Sugar Doctor) smart blood glucose meters. Among them, 69% of patients adhere to monthly monitoring, while 28.5% meet the national standard by testing more than four times per month. Among patients monitored by the medical team at Suiyang County Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, the proportion of users who test four times per month reaches as high as 41.9%.
By March 2016, six cities and counties in Guizhou Province had introduced diabetes prevention and control programs, covering nearly 10,000 diabetic patients in the region. This initiative established the “Guizhou Model” of Internet-plus chronic disease management, characterized by local government-led oversight, delivery of diagnosis and treatment services through local medical resources, and product and technical support provided by Tencent.
“Tengai Medical Strategy” and “Connecting Everything”
At the press conference, Ding Ke, Vice President of Tencent, stated, “The success of the ‘Guizhou Model’ is a crucial component of Tencent’s overall deployment of ‘Internet + Healthcare.’ It validates Tencent’s approach to enhancing healthcare services through internet technologies and has systematically shaped the strategic vision of ‘Tencent Ai Medical.’ ‘Tencent Ai Medical’ will be driven by four key pillars: smart terminals, a physician platform, internet finance positioned as ‘Health Fund + Medical Insurance,’ and big data.”
As early as 2014, at the Tencent Global Partners Conference, Ma Huateng profoundly defined Tencent’s future as “Connecting Everything.” Since then, Tencent’s products have ushered in a new strategic core.
In September of the same year, Tencent made a $70 million strategic investment in DXY.cn, marking its formal entry into the healthcare sector. Subsequently, it invested in Guahao.com, Zhuojian, and Medlinker. On March 10 this year, Tengai Doctor officially launched, simultaneously onboarding nine major physician groups. Against the backdrop of Tencent’s “Connect Everything” strategy, its Internet Plus Healthcare landscape appears to be expanding ever further.
From a capital perspective, the three key stakeholders—hospitals, physicians, and patients—constitute the core focus of Tencent’s investments in the healthcare industry. VCBeat has also categorized them accordingly:
So, how should we analyze the logic behind Tencent’s investments? VCBeat believes that it is difficult to arrive at an ideal answer by looking at capital alone. Where lies the key to the question? It inevitably remains—connectivity.
Since Pony Ma has positioned “connecting everything” as the core of Tencent’s strategy, this principle must guide the company’s investment and R&D efforts across all sectors, including internet healthcare. Following the launch of Teng Ai Doctor, VCBeat conducted an exclusive interview with Ding Ke, Vice President of Tencent. During the interview, he stated, “Tencent’s strongest suit is social networking, the essence of which is communication between people. In the specific context of doctor–patient communication, trust is paramount.” This further illustrates how Tencent translates its strategic direction into tactical execution: social connectivity and interpersonal communication represent the true entry point for Tencent’s internet healthcare initiatives.
The Transformation of the Role of Healthcare Entities Against the Strategic Backdrop of Connecting Everything
In accordance with the strategic principle of connecting everything, the positioning of key stakeholders is bound to change. In the traditional model, it was a deeply ingrained behavioral logic for patients to visit hospitals to consult doctors. However, with the advent of the “Internet + Healthcare” era, doctors, hospitals, and patients have broken away from their original fixed forms, and the roles they play have naturally changed as well. This inference can also be drawn from Tencent’s strategic layout:
Physician Entity
In the traditional model, physicians rely on hospitals as their primary platform; without this institutional affiliation, their individual professional value is difficult to realize. The launch of the Tengai Doctor app marks a new opportunity for physicians to create value independently. No longer entirely dependent on hospitals, they can build their own practice teams and establish personal brands. In an era where personal brand value is increasingly prominent, physicians, as independent professionals, can proactively engage with patients, enhance their visibility, and even become “star” doctors with dedicated follower bases. This represents the maximization of their clinical expertise and professional worth.
Hospital Entity
In the traditional model, hospitals functioned more like a loose aggregation of physicians. As a bloated and cumbersome entity, they engaged directly with patients in transactional interactions. Under this rigid framework, patients, driven by the Matthew Effect, tended to make irrational choices regarding healthcare resources, resulting in significant waste. The emergence of WeDoctor not only responds to the national policy on tiered diagnosis and treatment but also leverages big data and intelligent matching to reallocate hospital resources. In this new distribution model, every hospital, regardless of size, can operate more efficiently, akin to rusty gears being relubricated. Consequently, the role of hospitals has transformed from that of parasitic entities and mere transactional counterparts into highly matched, high-efficiency intelligent medical tools.
Patient Subject
In the traditional model, patients, driven by the urgent need for medical care due to injury or illness, occupy a disadvantaged position in transactional interactions with doctors and hospitals. The integration of QQ, WeChat, WeDoctor, and TengAi addresses this imbalance by transforming the rigid operational models of these two key stakeholders. Through social connectivity and personalized services, this approach effectively elevates patients’ bargaining power. Enhanced matching accuracy and greater freedom of choice have empowered patients to shift from passive recipients to active participants in their healthcare journey.
Relationship Models Among Healthcare Entities in the Strategic Context of Connecting Everything
“We are proceeding step by step, starting with smart wearable devices, then moving to the physician platform segment, and eventually expanding into medical consultation services, such as developing a medical encyclopedia. Within the WeChat ecosystem, we may also introduce an appointment registration portal,” said Ding Ke, Vice President of Tencent. As Tencent connects with an increasing number of entities, the composition of existing medical resources is becoming increasingly complex, while the relational models among these entities are growing clearer.
I. Physician–Patient–Physician
First are DXY and Medlinker, Tencent’s two pioneering ventures into internet healthcare. They share a common attribute: both are physician communities. However, DXY focuses primarily on academic exchange, whereas Medlinker adopts a case-based image-sharing social model. Clearly, Tencent’s primary objective in investing in these platforms is to access their high-quality, yet-to-be-monetized physician user base.
Returning to the strategy of “connecting everything,” after acquiring such a high-quality pool of physicians, Tencent’s own value had yet to be fully realized. How could communication costs be reduced and physicians’ work efficiency improved? Where was the information bridge between physicians? Thus, Teng Ai emerged. As an instant messaging app, Teng Ai effectively sidestepped the content-accumulation-based social model of online communities, forming a perfect complement to DXY and Medlinker. In this way, the communication chain was established.
Prior to the launch of Tengai, there was a lack of a complete and efficient communication channel between patients and physicians. While platforms like QQ and WeChat enabled patients to communicate with physicians at a low cost, they failed to reduce the time burden on physicians operating in a one-to-many model. The emergence of Tengai allows physicians to manage and care for patients using a team-based approach. This model indirectly increases each physician’s time dividend and enhances work efficiency, truly closing the loop between physicians and patients, thereby making their connection both highly efficient and cost-effective.
II. Patient–Hospital–Patient
The communication costs between patients and hospitals are largely a matter of matching medical conditions with appropriate healthcare resources. Therefore, WeDoctor strives to maximize access to medical resources, leveraging smarter and more precise matching to enable patients to quickly identify the most suitable hospitals. As for tiered diagnosis and treatment, VCBeat prefers to view it as an inevitable outcome of reduced communication costs, rather than describing it as a standalone operational model.
The communication costs between hospitals and patients stem largely from internal hospital processes. Patients are often deterred by the cumbersome procedures involved in seeking medical care, going to great lengths to avoid them. From a communication perspective, this is indeed a manifestation of inefficiency. Tencent’s optimism toward Zhuojian likely reflects its recognition of the company’s strengths and extensive experience in hospital intelligentization built over many years. Through this system, hospitals can achieve clearer and simplified workflows, while the acquisition of big data on patients enables effective patient surveys and management.
III. Physician–Hospital–Physician
During the Two Sessions last year, Ma Huateng stated that while relevant government departments had made substantial progress in informatization and accumulated vast amounts of data, these data remained disconnected. Tencent aims to leverage mobile internet technologies to bridge these information silos and improve public welfare. Internal management systems between hospitals and physicians have long functioned as isolated information silos, with poor collaboration across departments. Although numerous companies are engaged in developing solutions for this sector, their offerings remain relatively backward in both functionality and form. Hospitals, meanwhile, operate independently and tend to be conservative. Information exchange within hospitals is characterized by high frequency, large volume, and strong timeliness. Beyond real-time communication, extended functionalities include document management, administrative operations, information dissemination, personnel management, as well as the management and coordination of hospital resources. Therefore, possessing a highly efficient information connectivity system is decisive for enhancing hospital management and physician productivity.
As the only communication link among the three major players that Tencent has yet to engage with, this sector is arguably the most difficult to penetrate and integrate, judging from policy frameworks and structural dynamics. However, VCBeat believes that under its “Connect Everything” strategic vision, Tencent is unlikely to overlook this critical gap. Given Tencent’s inherent strengths in communications and big data, no other company is better positioned to undertake this task. Recent developments, such as the launch of WeCom (Enterprise WeChat), may offer a glimpse into its early moves in this direction. Therefore, breaking through this final communication barrier represents a key challenge for Tencent in the near future.
Guizhou Model+Exclusive Medical Insurance + Tang Daifu: Preliminary Realization of Big Data Connectivity Among Government, Insurers, and Individual Patients
From the strategic planning perspective of “Tencent Ai Healthcare,” the healthcare entities involved by Tencent extend beyond the three core levels of patients, physicians, and hospitals. Government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, smart terminals, physician platforms, financial and medical insurance services, and health big data are all critical factors enabling the proper functioning of the entire healthcare system.
Government and Pharmaceutical Sector: The strategic cooperation among Tencent, the Guizhou Provincial Health and Family Planning Commission, and Guizhou Bailing in the “Guizhou Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Plan” has yielded initial success with the “Guizhou Model.”
In the realm of medical finance and insurance: With the launch of the Tang Daifu 2.0 version at the end of last year, Tencent partnered with ZhongAn Insurance, China’s first internet-based insurance company, to tailor exclusive medical insurance products for diabetic patients. Moving forward, leveraging the experience gained from Tang Daifu, Tencent will provide a platform for other business lines, onboard more financial and insurance partners, and extend greater protection and benefits to a broader patient population.
In the realm of smart terminals and health big data: Smart devices such as the Tang Daifu smart glucometer, incubated by Tencent’s Dream Factory, have established robust connectivity between diabetic patients and multiple aspects of chronic disease medical services. Meanwhile, new chronic disease management platforms, built upon mobile internet and big data technologies, are gradually taking shape.
Under Tencent’s current strategic landscape, VCBeat has summarized the following three key points regarding Tencent’s current layout in internet healthcare:
Tencent has not become any medical entity.
Tencent is striving to establish seamless communication channels among all healthcare entities.
Tencent is striving to become the primary gateway connecting every healthcare entity.
Tencent Unveils “TengAi Medical Strategy” to Enter Internet HealthcareFor the traditional healthcare industry, Tencent’s move is hardly a terrifying threat. Given Tencent’s positioning as a “connector,” VCBeat views it more as an evangelist. An evangelist does not concern themselves with who travels the path, nor do they set the rules; their sole purpose is to break down barriers between groups and individuals. The true value of such evangelists will only be fully realized when all roads lead to Rome.