Is the Accompaniment Care Market Sparking a Peripheral Revolution in Mobile Healthcare?

The mobile health market has entered its fourth year since 2013. After experiencing platform construction dominated by internet thinking, subsidy wars aimed at “losing money to gain buzz,” a “land grab” centered on physician resources, and deeply vertical specialization based on professional segmentation, the mobile health market in 2016 is destined to present a relatively clear landscape as the fog lifts, the bubble bursts, and the dust settles. Those pigs, sheep, and dogs once swept up by the wind of opportunity will eventually find their rightful place after going through repeated cycles of surprise, confusion, inflation, blind optimism, and self-denial.

The once-buzzing mobile health sector, like a timely shot of adrenaline, has breathed new life into the age-old traditional healthcare industry while simultaneously losing its own sense of direction. As a component of mobile health, the nurse-led patient escort service industry has remained conspicuously quiet amidst the clamor that “whoever wins the doctors wins the market.”

High-quality physician resources can address critical pain points, but the industry is still exploring how to effectively align on-the-ground physician resources with the mobile healthcare sector. From a management cost perspective, the cost of managing nurses is significantly lower than that of managing physicians. As a result, nursing resources are once again at the forefront of the market, and nurses are no longer content to remain in passive roles. This time, we take a fresh look at the current medical escort market. It becomes evident that medical escort services are not a dispensable fringe segment of mobile healthcare; rather, they represent a mid-to-high-end service experience that can span the entire lifecycle.

Nursing resources are by no means a channel for monetization.

The escort service business, centered on aggregating high-quality nursing resources from Grade A tertiary hospitals, is often mistakenly assumed to be a means of monetizing these nursing resources. This is a common pitfall in the early trial-and-error phase of the patient escort industry. However, the author believes that high-quality nurses are invaluable assets essential for survival in the patient escort sector, serving as the entry point and source for all subsequent business development. Only by building a highly competent nursing team can a company remain invincible in future market competition. Therefore, instead of exploiting nurses for short-term gains—a approach akin to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs—companies operating in the patient escort business should leverage capital operations to maximize benefits for nurses.

Amid skepticism over whether patient escort services constitute a rigid demand, and against the backdrop of investors’ overall wait-and-see stance toward mobile healthcare, the author believes that this period of market calm presents an opportune moment for the patient escort industry to truly come into the spotlight. Since nursing resources cannot be directly monetized, and subsidy wars to cultivate the market will ultimately cause internal harm, where exactly lie the monetization channels for the patient escort sector? After half a year of development, the patient escort industry has carved out a survival path by adopting a bundled strategy that leverages key account resources, with B2B as the primary driver and B2C as the foundation for building reputation.

This business model targets mid-to-high-end consumers for medical accompaniment services. By leveraging large corporate clients such as insurance companies, banks, and precious metal firms to cover the costs, it not only cultivates the market but also secures endorsements from these traditional industries for the emerging medical accompaniment sector. Their substantial financial backing ensures a worry-free experience for users.

The elderly population is both the target user and not.

Who Needs a Companion When Visiting the Hospital? Many People’s First Thought Is the Elderly Population. However, the Primary Target Customers of the Medical Escort Industry Are Not the Elderly. Setting Aside the Medical Escort Industry for Now, Any Industry Seeking Sustainable Growth Finds Business Opportunities When Users’ Service Needs Align with Their Willingness and Ability to Pay. The Medical Escort Industry Is No Exception. On the Surface, the Elderly Population Indeed Has Significant Demand for Medical Escort Services, but Most Elderly Individuals Lack the Willingness to Pay; Instead, They Have Abundant Time That They Do Not Know How to Spend. This Means That the Elderly Population Generally Has No Willingness to Pay for Saving Time During Medical Visits.

So, how can we meet the needs of the elderly population who require services but lack the willingness to pay for them? As is well known, the optimal service state for medical accompaniment businesses is to save consultation time and improve efficiency. Whether industry efficiency can be improved is also one of the criteria for judging whether a startup project has value. In the field of medical accompaniment, saving time represents not only the process during the consultation but also whether it can save time for paying customers. When the service needs of the elderly are paid for by their children, it indirectly saves the children's time as well. That is, although the payer is not the apparent recipient of the service, they still gain time and peace of mind regarding their parents' medical visits.

Therefore, from the sole perspective of time savings, the target customers of the medical accompaniment industry are those who value time costs and seek to save time and improve efficiency during hospital visits, including pregnant women, children, patients seeking care away from their home locations, and the elderly.

Escort Services: A Powerful Tool to Alleviate Nurse Attrition in Public Hospitals

Since the companion medical consultation service relies on nursing resources to support its overall operations, will the mobile healthcare industry, using this service as an entry point, become a new domain that competes with public hospitals for nurses rather than physicians? Quite the contrary; the companion medical consultation service will not only avoid competing with public hospitals for nursing staff but will also effectively help mitigate the current trend of nurse attrition in public hospitals.

A 2014 survey by the Ministry of Health showed that the average nurse turnover rate in tertiary hospitals across China was 5.8%, with a peak of 12%. In developed regions such as Shanghai and Guangdong, the turnover rate frequently ranged from 8% to 10%.

Corresponding to this high attrition rate is the persistently low number of nurses per 1,000 population in China. The number of nurses and midwives per 1,000 people is one of the key indicators for assessing a country’s healthcare conditions. According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, Norway has the highest number of nurses per capita globally, with 17.27 nurses per 1,000 people. The basic standard set by the European Union is more than 8 nurses per 1,000 people, while the figures for the United States and Japan are 9.8 and 11.49, respectively. In contrast, China did not reach the milestone of 2 nurses per 1,000 people until 2013. Faced with a severe shortage of nurses and a persistently high attrition rate, China’s nursing profession is undergoing an unprecedented and严峻 test.

High work intensity and low compensation are the primary reasons for the current state of the nursing profession. In particular, early-career nurses constitute the most unstable segment of the entire nursing workforce. The most direct approach to retaining nurses in public hospitals is to improve their overall compensation and benefits.

The provision of medical escort services leverages the off-duty hours of nurses at tertiary Grade A hospitals to offer part-time nursing accompaniment. This model not only integrates nurses’ fragmented spare time and improves their compensation but also expands their career development pathways, serving as a key strategy for stabilizing the nursing workforce at tertiary Grade A hospitals.

Today, when we revisit the medical escort industry, we can no longer view it in isolation as a single service offering. Medical escorting serves as a specialized entry point for integrating China’s 2.92 million registered nurses. In the near future, nurses specializing in medical escorting, home care, staffing agency placements, and emergency transport (by ambulance or air) will become prevalent across all stages of the life cycle, including in-hospital escort services, home nursing, private clinics, emergency response systems, and hospice care. High-quality nurse resource platforms that leverage medical escorting as their initial focus will hold immense potential for future growth.

(About the author: Wu Jianhua, an IT veteran and founder of Beijing Doctor Network, is currently the founder of Anxin Peizhen.)