Innovation, Compliance, and Long-Termism: JD Health's Three Pillars in Internet Healthcare

In 2023, the investment frenzy in the internet healthcare sector gradually subsided. Some platforms chose to shut down and exit the market, while others were forced to further scale back their operations. This widespread stagnation cast a shadow over the industry’s development.

The industry is in urgent need of encouraging news.

At the 2024 JD Health Annual Doctor Gala, JD Health, as the “primary gateway to internet healthcare,” recorded over 160 million consultations throughout 2023. While further solidifying its competitive advantages, it continues to forge ahead in the specialized domains of the internet healthcare industry. Its development has undoubtedly served as a “shot in the arm” for the entire sector.



At the Annual Doctor Gala, JD Health shared the achievements of its internet hospital initiatives and presented prestigious awards—including the “JD Excellent Doctor Award,” “Most Trusted by Patients Award,” “Innovation Exploration Award,” and “Best Partner Award”—to partner physicians and collaborators who have made outstanding contributions. The event also featured insights from multiple physicians on frontier explorations in medical research within the AI era. Notably, JD Health unveiled a new tool, the “Intelligent Doctor Assistant,” powered by its “Jingyi Qianxun” large language model, to comprehensively support physicians in clinical practice, medical education, and scientific research.

As Jin Enlin, CEO of JD Health, noted, JD Health is “creating greater value for doctors and users” by “consistently and deeply cultivating the internet healthcare sector over the long term, as always.” So, how has JD Health achieved this?

Data may better illustrate the results achieved by JD Health over the past year.

From an overall scale perspective, JD Health recorded over 160 million consultations in 2023.Among these, the 30-second response rate for rapid consultations reached 90.4%, with over 18 million authentic patient reviews accumulated and a patient satisfaction rate as high as 98.1%. At the inaugural Annual Doctor Gala in 2023, the total number of consultations for the full year of 2022 had just surpassed 100 million. In terms of daily online consultation demand, the figure stood at over 300,000 in 2022, rising to more than 440,000 in the first half of 2023. Overall, the volume of services provided by doctors saw significant growth in 2023 compared to 2022.

From the perspective of specialty development, JD Health has established 27 specialty centers to date.Among these, dermatology and psychiatry are the key focus areas in the development of JD Health’s Specialty Centers. In dermatology, more than 3,000 dermatologists from Grade A tertiary hospitals have joined JD Health’s Online Dermatology Hospital; over 40 leading experts have established their online renowned physician studios; and services are provided to patients based on a whole-course management model. In psychiatry, more than 1,000 professional psychological counselors and 6,000 psychiatrists have joined the platform, with services covering various aspects such as workplace issues, parent-child relationships, and marriage. By the end of 2023, JD Health’s Psychological Service Center had cumulatively served hundreds of thousands of users.

Behind the data lies the result of further deepening of internet medical services. On one hand, doctors have increasingly recognized the importance of internet hospitals and are actively participating in them. According to research by JD Health, as of 2023, more than 50% of doctors had used internet medical platforms in their daily work. On the other hand, patients have genuinely experienced the convenience of internet medical services. The improvement in accessibility of medical services has driven an increase in patients’ willingness to access internet medical services. Meanwhile, rising satisfaction levels have further encouraged more doctors to remain active online, thereby facilitating further expansion of service capacity.

Evidently, the importance of physicians in the provision of internet-based medical services is self-evident. Platform-based internet hospitals can better serve patients only by providing superior support to doctors. “Seventy percent of the physicians who joined JD Health Internet Hospital during its initial launch remain active on the platform, consistently providing professional assistance to patients,” said Fan Hui, General Manager of the Internet Medical Division at JD Health.

Since the launch of JD Health’s Internet Hospital in 2017, six years have passed.

Over the past six years, JD Health has continuously refined its service offerings. Following the launch of its online consultation services in 2017, JD Health introduced its first Cardiac Center in 2019 and subsequently rolled out multiple specialty centers, including those for otolaryngology, starting in 2021. The company has been steadily enhancing its “general practice + specialty care” model to deliver comprehensive services covering both “disease management + health wellness” for the entire population, while meeting users’ integrated “medical + pharmaceutical” needs through a diverse portfolio of healthcare and pharmaceutical products. Within this ecosystem, physicians play a pivotal role.

An example may well illustrate the relationship between JD Health’s Internet Hospital and the physicians affiliated with its platform. Dr. Gou Jiang from Xi’an People’s Hospital (Xi’an No. 4 Hospital) was among the first physicians to join the platform at its inception. When he joined six years ago, Dr. Gou was an attending physician. Through his participation in JD Health’s online consultation platform, he has continuously encountered a wide variety of cases, enhanced his professional expertise, and accessed cutting-edge medical information and specialized knowledge via the platform. Alongside JD Health, he has advanced to the rank of associate chief physician.

Dr. Gou Jiang’s professional growth is merely a microcosm of the countless physicians who are advancing alongside JD Health as they deliver medical services on the platform. JD Health is continuously empowering physicians through innovative technologies across various dimensions, including disease diagnosis and treatment, as well as academic research.

First, enhance physicians’ capabilities in online diagnosis and treatment.Leveraging JD Health’s intelligent clinical decision support platform for the entire care journey, more precise patient-provider matching and disease screening can be achieved during the pre-consultation phase. For instance, in dermatology, the use of pre-consultation questionnaires reduces patient input time by over 20%, significantly enhancing the diagnostic and treatment experience. Furthermore, by leveraging image recognition technology to analyze patients’ speech, facial expressions, and other cues from video consultations, the system enables more accurate assessment of patient emotions, thereby better supporting psychiatrists and psychologists in their clinical decision-making. During the consultation, JD Health’s online specialty-specific clinical decision support and intelligent electronic medical record (EMR) functionalities effectively improve physician-patient communication efficiency and enhance the overall patient experience.

Notably, it is crucial to strengthen physicians’ post-consultation management capabilities for patients. Internet-based post-consultation management itself contributes to improved patient prognosis, enhanced hospital operational efficiency, and reduced health insurance expenditures, while also integrating with offline hospital services to form a continuous service loop. Its importance is growing increasingly significant. JD Health’s post-consultation management, which covers the entire disease cycle and all scenarios, leverages tools for whole-course disease management, patient medical record folders, and health management platforms to achieve refined patient management and data accumulation, thereby comprehensively supporting physicians in their post-consultation management of patients.

For instance, Xu Jie, an associate chief physician in the Department of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology at the Children’s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, leveraged JD Health’s post-consultation management capabilities to address the challenge of remote patient management. Within just four months of joining the JD Health Internet Hospital, Dr. Xu provided post-consultation services to 2,766 patients, maintained long-term management for 1,372 patients, among whom 896 were her existing follow-up patients.

Secondly, enhancing physicians’ academic and research capabilities.Traditionally, offline academic research has often faced numerous challenges, including prolonged timelines, difficulties in patient recruitment, and complex data management. Leveraging JD Health’s Real-World Data (RWD) Research Platform, researchers can efficiently govern in-hospital data while integrating out-of-hospital follow-up data to achieve full-cycle information collection, thereby reducing costs. Through a comprehensive suite of follow-up tools and patient incentive systems, the platform enhances follow-up efficiency and patient adherence, enabling studies to obtain more multidimensionally complete data. Furthermore, it facilitates broad scenario validation through digital therapeutics for multiple disease indications. To date, JD Health has partnered with over 200 specialized disease projects and manages a patient population exceeding 120,000.

Finally, it is worth noting that AI is integrating into and transforming our world at an accelerating pace.In July 2023, JD Health released its large language model for the healthcare industry, “Jingyi Qianxun,” for the first time., this is also the industry’s first large-scale health knowledge graph with millions of entities, integrating physical products with services and merging knowledge with data. It has accumulated over 100 million high-quality health records covering both online and offline doctor-patient scenarios and possesses massive big data on the end-to-end circulation of pharmaceuticals. The full-course intelligent clinical decision support platform is built upon the “Jingyi Qianxun” large model technology foundation.

As a “technological foundation,” it is also driving the intelligent upgrade of solutions and products across the entire industry. At the conference, Wang Huiling, Chief Physician and Professor at the Mental Health Center of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, shared insights on the exploration of generative AI in psychiatry and psychology. She pointed out that digital and data-intelligent tools are comprehensively enhancing service efficiency. Wuhan University has also collaborated with JD Health to develop PsyGPT, aiming to address diagnostic and treatment challenges for common psychiatric disorders by exploring applications in scenarios such as pre-consultation interviews and intra-consultation medical record documentation. Guo Hao, Associate Chief Physician in the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, stated that AI can help physicians identify patient conditions from a 360-degree perspective and formulate treatment plans, thereby fundamentally improving medical efficiency. These initiatives demonstrate JD Health’s further exploration of AI applications in specialized medical fields.

In 2023, influenced by the overall environment, the public held a somewhat negative and pessimistic outlook on the future development of industries including internet healthcare. However, it is evident that with the successive introduction in 2022 of regulatory policies for the two key sectors of internet healthcare and pharmaceuticals, a clearer path has been charted for the healthy development of the internet healthcare industry, with the improvement of medical quality and safety becoming the central theme of the sector.

JD Health’s current achievements are largely attributable to its success in better empowering physicians to deliver care. This goes beyond technology alone, encompassing comprehensive aspects such as regulatory compliance and quality control. By examining JD Health, we may uncover the key to navigating the industry through challenging times and achieving innovative growth—

First, it continuously provides innovative tools to comprehensively empower physicians.As service providers, physicians also have needs for professional growth during their online practice. Adhering to a “physician-centric” approach, JD Health supports physicians’ internet-based practice by continuously implementing and refining a series of innovative projects and solutions, including “Cloud Consultation Rooms,” post-consultation follow-ups, multi-expert joint consultations, clinical research, and physician IP brand incubation. Additionally, JD Health provides a Real-World Data (RWD) research platform to facilitate physicians’ scientific research. The recently launched “Intelligent Physician Assistant” and other tools will further serve as assistants for research, teaching, and schedule management, comprehensively meeting physicians’ needs and enhancing their capabilities in medical practice, education, and research.

Second, it involves building a multi-tiered healthcare service system and delivering deeper online-to-offline (O2O) integrated service experiences to meet users’ health needs.In the course of providing healthcare services, JD Health has established a multi-tiered medical system that achieves comprehensive coverage across general practice and specialized care, as well as among both healthy individuals and patients. While continuously pioneering innovations in online services, JD Health is also building a closed-loop offline service ecosystem. For instance, through its self-operated experience centers and the Suyu Hospital developed in collaboration with relevant authorities in Suqian, it offers local patients a more convenient, integrated online-to-offline (O2O) service experience. This distinction makes JD Health the only internet healthcare company in the industry to operate both self-owned offline pharmacies and self-owned offline medical service institutions.

Third, improve online service processes and implement standardized management to ensure transparency, compliance, and service quality.First, JD Health has established standardized clinical pathways.As of now, the Medical Quality Management Committee of JD Health Internet Hospital has appointed 8 Chief Medical Experts and 33 Distinguished Medical Experts, reached consensus on standardized diagnosis and treatment protocols for high-frequency online diseases across various specialties, and released 223 standardized clinical pathways.Secondly, standardized management.JD Health Internet Hospital has established a Medical Quality Management Committee to continuously refine and implement the "Core Systems for Medical Quality Control at JD Health Internet Hospital." From credential verification for physician onboarding to diagnosis and prescription issuance, JD Health ensures full-process compliance through standardized management in accordance with legal practice requirements and strict adherence to registration and filing mandates.Furthermore, by upgrading the data for large-scale quality control models and expanding the pool of experts on the Medical Quality Management Committee, we combine AI with human oversight to achieve broader coverage, faster response times, and more effective control across the entire quality assurance system.Furthermore, JD Health places particular emphasis on safeguarding user privacy and clinical data.

And these may well be the “answer” that JD Health has contributed to the booming development of the internet healthcare industry.The healthcare sector differs from other industries, as it is more closely tied to patients’ lives and dignity and demands a greater focus on long-term value. In these challenging times, only by embracing long-termism and adhering to high-quality, standardized development can we “weather the storm and see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

As Jin Enlin, CEO of JD Health, mentioned at the conference,“JD Health will always keep in mind the essence of healthcare, continue to deeply cultivate the field of internet medical services as always, and remain committed to providing users with professional, convenient, and trustworthy healthcare services, offering doctors a safe and compliant practice platform along with efficient and intelligent practice tools, thereby creating greater value for both users and doctors.”

Perhaps, as platforms like JD Health continue to uphold their commitment, we will ultimately see online medical and health services become an indispensable part of our daily lives, delivering and creating greater value. Meanwhile, the internet healthcare industry will also take more steady steps forward.