Pain Online, China's First Vertically Focused Mobile Healthcare Platform, Files for IPO
The domestic vertical mobile healthcare platform “Pain Online” announced its launch in early 2016. Leveraging internet technologies and environments, “Pain Online” utilizes smart terminals such as smartphones and PCs to create the most professional and comprehensive shared platform for medical practice, education, and research for all clinicians. Developed under the leadership of Professor Han Jisheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the founder of pain medicine in China, the platform has become the largest community of pain specialists in China.
As the fifth vital sign of the human body, following respiration, pulse, blood pressure, and body temperature, advancements in pain diagnosis and treatment have benefited from rapid developments in modern social ethics, basic medical research on pain, the development and improvement of analgesic drugs, imaging diagnostics and navigation technologies, minimally invasive analgesia techniques, and computer technology.
“Pain medicine, as a central discipline, is assuming an increasingly prominent role across the entire field of medicine.” Professor Fan Bifa, Director of the Pain Center at China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Chairman of the Pain Professional Committee of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, and Immediate Past Chairman of the Pain Branch of the Chinese Medical Association, stated that pain medicine currently focuses primarily on chronic pain in clinical practice, with patients mostly suffering from neuropathic pain, shoulder-neck-waist-and-leg pain, and cancer-related pain. In recent years, following the issuance of Document No. 227 by the Ministry of Health, numerous pain diagnosis and treatment departments and centers have emerged as new specialties in hospitals at all levels throughout China, significantly improving the quality of life for pain patients.
It is reported that pain management departments have now been established in all tertiary hospitals across China, as well as in some secondary and county-level hospitals.
Zhang Tianxiong, CEO of “Pain Online,” introduced that the core philosophy of their product advocates for value-driven services and user stickiness. It aims to build mentorship-based communities, disciplinary technical groups, and interest-based circles among physicians across different regions and hierarchical levels. Leveraging the exclusivity and targeted nature of these communities, pain specialists can easily achieve goals such as effortless learning, professional growth, and personal brand building. Furthermore, these physician mentorship social networks can drive talent development within the discipline, particularly focusing on cultivating specialized talent in county-level hospitals. By transforming these communities into small-scale physician groups through strategic alliances, medical resources can be restructured. Based on mutual trust, cooperation, and complementary strengths within these circles, the effective implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment as well as multi-site practice is facilitated.
The web-like networks of physicians are not only maps of disciplinary specialists featuring renowned mentors and their protégés, but also enable patients to easily locate the urgently needed experts and the teams of physicians they have trained and lead, which are distributed across China. Ultimately, given that pain is a prominent vital sign—reflected in the saying “nine out of ten diseases involve pain”—and that patients often seek medical care due to pain, pain management is poised to become a major entry point for healthcare access. This positions “Pain Online” to evolve into a robust patient-entry triage platform.
“Pain Online” CEO Zhang Tianxiong believes that the development of mobile healthcare has gradually become more rational, and the deep vertical development of medical internet, integrating physician groups and Internet+ thinking, will become a new round of innovative exploration.