ChiDuiYao: The 'Dianping' for OTC Medications Files IPO Prospectus

“Reading and referencing other people’s reviews has become our habit.” Li Peiqiao told VCBeat that with the development of the internet, searching for others’ evaluations online has become a necessary step in people’s decision-making processes. For instance, before entering a restaurant, you would check its reputation on Dianping; similarly, before making a purchase on Taobao, you would certainly browse the comment section to see how others rate the product. However, the current pharmaceutical market lacks such a reference platform for reviews.

Li Peiqiao’s ongoing project, “Take the Right Medicine,” serves as a consumer review platform akin to Dianping, specifically tailored for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. The “Take the Right Medicine” app leverages user reviews as its entry point, enabling consumers to check evaluations of drug efficacy and side effects from other users who have purchased the medication before buying it at physical pharmacies or online. By facilitating peer-to-peer support through user-generated drug reviews and shared medication experiences, the platform enhances transparency in pharmaceutical information, ultimately empowering more users to “take the right medicine and achieve better health outcomes.”

Mitigating Issues Arising from Information Asymmetry in the Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Sector

Regarding the rationale for selecting over-the-counter (OTC) drugs as the core product, Li Peiqiao cited two primary reasons. On one hand, pharmaceuticals are standardized products that lend themselves to standardized evaluation. On the other hand, due to the closed nature and asymmetry of medical information, both drug purchasers and sellers (pharmacies) face numerous pain points that urgently need to be addressed.

For medication purchasers, in most cases, they lack pharmaceutical knowledge and often overdose or take medications with low levels of active ingredients. They have to rely on recommendations from doctors or pharmacies, unable to observe the treatment outcomes of fellow patients with similar conditions to inform their own medication decisions. Furthermore, some pharmacies, driven by profit motives, may recommend drugs with equivalent efficacy but higher prices. For medication sellers, their sales coverage is limited, customer traffic is relatively low, and advertising effectiveness is poor. As for upstream entities in the drug sales chain, such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, they are unable to obtain authentic data on patient treatment outcomes.

“Chi Dui Yao” currently encompasses over 200,000 drug information entries, along with numerous authentic medication reviews from patients. When purchasing medications online or offline, users can freely access real-world drug evaluations from other users via the “Chi Dui Yao” app to inform their purchasing decisions. Additionally, “Chi Dui Yao” features a large team of online pharmacists who provide free answers to users’ medication-related inquiries.

When using the service, users can search for medications by body part, disease, or medical department. Taking search by body part as an example, there are 18 categories, including the head, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. Each category encompasses various diseases, and the corresponding medications are displayed for each disease.

On the medication page, users can view information such as the drug’s packaging, rating score, price, and manufacturer. Additionally, they can access details on dosage and administration, ingredients, physical description, drug interactions, adverse reactions, contraindications, precautions, and therapeutic indications.

Users who have taken this medication can select the “Write a Medication Review” feature to provide corresponding efficacy ratings. They can also indicate whether the medication caused any side effects; if so, they may check the boxes corresponding to the specific adverse reactions experienced.

Meanwhile, to prevent malicious defamation of pharmaceutical products, reviews are subject to manual moderation in the product backend, and accounts that repeatedly post malicious reviews will be muted.

In the future, the product will open interfaces for pharmaceutical e-commerce, connect with C-certified pharmacies across China, and collaborate with offline stores for mutual traffic diversion.

Furthermore, as product reviews reach a larger scale, the platform will offer data services to pharmaceutical companies, providing them with corresponding user feedback surveys on their medications.

According to reports, the “Take the Right Medication” app is the first mobile application developed by Beijing Yaoshijie Technology Development Co., Ltd. The company was established in December 2014 and has a team of 30 employees.

Since its launch, “Chi Dui Yao” has amassed over 300,000 registered users and more than 60,000 daily active users, with over 2.6 million pieces of user-generated content (UGC), including drug reviews and experience sharing.

The team is currently undergoing Series A financing.