Guahao.com to Form 5,000 Expert Medical Teams and Onboard 300,000 Doctors to Advance Tiered Healthcare

On June 3, at the Centennial Anniversary of the Chinese Medical Journal and the Summit Forum on High-Tech Medical Development and Internet Healthcare (Beijing Session), Liao Jieyuan, Chairman and CEO of Guahao.com, announced that Guahao.com plans to establish 5,000 expert teams in 2015, bringing together at least 300,000 physicians to help patients access quality medical care closer to home and support the realization of China’s tiered diagnosis and treatment system.



Liao Jieyuan stated that the severe information asymmetry between supply and demand sides, coupled with the highly uneven utilization of medical resources, are the two key bottlenecks causing difficulties for China’s 1 billion people in accessing medical care. The current administrative-led initiative to establish a tiered diagnosis and treatment system has made no substantial progress due to the lack of an intrinsic incentive mechanism for cooperation among medical institutions. Meanwhile, the high out-of-pocket share of medical expenses for patients means that medical insurance reimbursement rates offer limited attraction for initial consultations at community-level facilities.

In practice, tiered diagnosis and treatment is undoubtedly an effective solution to the problem of patients flocking to large hospitals, while team-based care has become the breakthrough point for implementing this system. Thus, on March 28 this year, Guahao.com officially launched the online physician collaboration organization, “Weiyi Group.” The most distinctive feature of Weiyi Group is its aim to better optimize the matching of doctor and patient resources through team-based care, thereby facilitating the practical implementation of tiered diagnosis and treatment.

In Liao Jieyuan’s vision, with team-based medicine as the breakthrough point, the ultimate scenario to be achieved by tiered diagnosis and treatment in the future is: the public can find suitable doctors rather than merely the most renowned ones through the most convenient means; every doctor is backed by a robust expert team for support; leading specialists focus on research, diagnosis, and treatment of complex and refractory diseases, discipline development, and talent cultivation, while routine diagnosis and treatment are carried out collaboratively by team members.

Liao Jieyuan believes that the core crux of the current difficulty in accessing medical care in China lies in the absence of a family doctor system, which has resulted in specialists at large hospitals being overwhelmed while doctors at smaller hospitals lack patients. This situation significantly wastes medical resources and fails to fully realize physicians’ capacity for patient consultations. It is reported that within Micro Medical Group’s existing expert teams, the typical team size ranges from 10 to 100 members. This means that an expert team of 100 members can, through division of labor and collaboration, expand the patient consultation capacity of a single specialist by dozens or even hundreds of times.



How is this achieved? To better leverage physician resources, WeDoctor Group is committed to helping doctors work more efficiently in three aspects: first, enabling the most efficient sharing of experts’ experience; second, ensuring the most efficient use of doctors’ time; and third, facilitating the most efficient matching between doctors and patients.

How to Maximize the Efficiency of Expertise and Physicians’ Time: WeDoctor’s Approach via an Internet-Based Collaborative PlatformWeDoctor aims to address this challenge through an internet-based collaborative work platform. Members of an expert’s team—drawn from different hospitals, regions, and medical specialties—can conveniently exchange insights on various medical cases, including video-based discussions of surgical procedures, on WeDoctor’s collaborative platform. When a physician is treating a patient and feels that their own expertise is insufficient to resolve the case, they can instantly connect via mobile phone with any member of their team for remote consultation. If even remote consultation proves inadequate, WeDoctor activates a green channel for referral, directly transferring the patient to top-tier specialists in the relevant field.

Furthermore, the WeDoctor collaborative platform features educational sharing capabilities. Throughout the diagnostic and treatment process, if physicians identify particularly significant medical cases, they can immediately engage in comprehensive discussions and communications with other doctors on this collaboration platform. Moreover, when an expert is performing a particularly critical or complex surgery, they can stream the surgical video directly via the collaborative platform for joint discussion among all specialist physicians in the team, achieving effects comparable to those of live, face-to-face teaching.

Beyond serving as a platform for physician collaboration, WeDoctor also functions as the most efficient matching platform connecting doctors and patients. Each expert team within WeDoctor Group is assigned a “Department Secretary,” typically a head nurse or a resident physician. After a patient schedules an appointment with an expert team, the Department Secretary first triages the case based on the complexity and severity of the patient’s condition, and then arranges for physicians of varying seniority levels within the expert team to provide appropriate medical services.

WeDoctor’s highly efficient collaborative platform has attracted a cohort of renowned physicians. It is reported that the expert teams within WeDoctor Group typically comprise between 10 and 100 members. Currently, WeDoctor Group has recruited numerous medical teams, including national top-tier experts such as TCM Master Xuan Guowei and Professor Xie Lixin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering; Professor Li Yongjie from Beijing Xuanwu Hospital, known as “China’s Pioneer in Stereotactic Radiosurgery”; and Professor Chen Shiyi, a leading sports medicine specialist who previously treated athlete Liu Xiang’s foot injury.

In Beijing and Shanghai, where medical resources are most abundant in China, WeDoctor Group has achieved near-universal coverage of all top-tier Grade 3A hospitals. Renowned institutions such as Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Peking University Third Hospital, and Beijing Tongren Hospital have each onboarded varying numbers of expert medical teams onto the platform.

According to Guahao.com’s plan, 5,000 expert teams were to be developed in 2015. Assuming each expert team comprises 50 physicians, Micro Medical Group alone could bring at least 200,000 to 300,000 doctors online in 2015. If each team assigns at least three staff members to handle triage, there would be 15,000 professional healthcare providers across China offering triage and patient navigation services akin to family doctors, enabling the public to easily access trustworthy physicians nearby.