Ant Group Makes Another Strategic Move Post-HaoDF Acquisition with Ant Afu Doctor Launch

More than a year ago, the news of Ant Group’s acquisition of HaoDF sent shockwaves through the entire internet healthcare industry.

Today, the integration between the two parties has achieved another substantial milestone. On August 12, Ant Group announced that its “HaoDF Doctor Edition” has been officially upgraded to “Ant Afu Doctor Edition,” leveraging AI to provide Chinese physicians with services such as clinical decision support, research literature retrieval, and patient management. Furthermore, Afu Doctor Edition is deeply integrated with the Afu APP, enabling coordinated operations across both platforms.

This means that Ant Group’s technological capabilities and its platform with hundreds of millions of users, combined with HaoDF’s years-accumulated resources in physician services, are accelerating the formation of a closed-loop ecosystem.

The upgraded Ant Afu Doctor Edition introduces two key features: an AI Medical Assistant and an AI Avatar Assistant. Combined with its existing tools, it covers the full spectrum of workflow scenarios, including live streaming, online consultations, patient follow-up and management, and academic research. It is also integrated with the Ant Afu App, providing access to over 100 million Afu users.

AI Medical Assistant aims to help doctors easily access cutting-edge medical knowledge and assist in improving the efficiency of clinical decision-making.

Ant Afu Doctor Edition has entered into a strategic partnership with Wolters Kluwer, leveraging its authoritative medical content to provide physicians with more reliable and trustworthy clinical insights. It is reported that Ant Afu Doctor Edition is also exploring in-depth collaboration with UpToDate, a Wolters Kluwer brand hailed as the “gold standard of evidence-based medicine,” to further advance the application of trustworthy artificial intelligence in healthcare.

Meanwhile, Ant Group has entered into a strategic partnership with DP Technology, a leader in AI for Science. Leveraging the strengths of Bohr Science Navigator in deep scientific literature retrieval and evidence-based knowledge, the collaboration provides high-quality medical scientific data support for the Afu Doctor Edition.

Thus, by using an AI medical assistant, physicians can effortlessly and freely access traceable, authoritative medical content without needing to navigate multiple specialized knowledge bases.

Ant Group's Afu Doctor Edition: AI Medical Assistant and AI Avatar Assistant

AI Avatar Assistants Focus on Solving Physicians' Workflow and Efficiency Challenges. It supports 24/7 online responses to user inquiries, promptly addressing patient needs. In scenarios such as pre-consultation triage, post-visit follow-ups, and health record maintenance, AI can rapidly handle administrative tasks like organizing medical records and summarizing follow-up notes. This facilitates smoother and more efficient communication between healthcare providers and patients, while ensuring that the care patients receive is more coherent and reassuring.

From the user’s perspective, this upgrade of the Afu Doctor Edition and its integration with the Afu App create a complete healthcare service workflow. Users can interact with the Afu App through simple methods such as text-and-image uploads or voice messages, allowing AI to provide preliminary analysis and answers. If further assistance is needed—for instance, for health-related questions in 16 specialties including ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) and Stomatology—users can invite physicians from tertiary hospitals to review and confirm the AI’s responses. Additionally, if online consultations or offline medical visits are required, the AI can recommend suitable doctors and facilitate more convenient connections, thereby enhancing the efficiency of doctor-patient matching.

It is worth noting that, The entire system leverages AI to enhance efficiency across all stages, while adhering to the “Doctor in the Loop” (physician oversight) principle, with AI and physicians working in synergy to provide users with professional and trustworthy services.

The launch of the Afu Doctor Edition is the natural outcome of more than a year of deep integration between Ant Group and Haodafu’s products and business operations.

AI technology and platform capabilities are Ant Group’s strengths. On the physician side, Ant is continuously leveraging tools to help doctors reduce their workload and improve efficiency.

In early 2026, Afu launched the DeepSearch feature on its PC platform, offering free access to physicians, medical students, and primary healthcare workers to provide AI-assisted support for clinical decision-making and scientific research. Starting in March 2026, Afu began inviting platform physicians to activate the first batch of AI avatars; concurrently, it recruited doctors to participate in a collaborative consultation model featuring “AI initial response with physician oversight.”

This step-by-step approach allows physicians to gradually experience the dual value of AI assistance in clinical practice: Not only can it efficiently manage the "existing" patient base accumulated through daily offline QR code scans, but it can also expand the "incremental" user base by reaching more new users with urgent healthcare needs.

Meanwhile, on the user end, driven by the sustained surge in public health demands, Afu achieved a breakthrough from zero to 100 million users within just one year of launch, with daily user inquiries exceeding 10 million. Recently, the “Scientific Weight Loss: 100 Million Jin” campaign once again went viral across the entire internet.

Today, users turning to “Ask Afu” when health issues arise is becoming as natural as searching on a search engine was in the search engine era.

As physicians grow to trust and become familiar with AI-assisted models, they can accommodate larger-scale and more personalized user demands; as the public’s diverse health needs continue to emerge, there is a growing expectation for deeper, more professional health advice and services. The dual-platform integration of Ant Afu Doctor Edition and the Afu App creates a more complete Health+AI service chain.

Ant Afu Doctor Edition Medical Workstation

Another significant change in this upgrade of the Afu Doctor Edition is that it is no longer limited to individually registered physicians; for the first time, it opens its internet hospital services to medical institutions across China, supporting institutional-level integrated access.

Physicians affiliated with the hospital can perform all internet hospital services—including online consultations, follow-up management, and patient record maintenance—through a single account on one platform, eliminating the need to frequently switch between multiple systems.

This move sends a clear signal: Ant Group is actively embracing the healthcare system, aiming to enhance industry efficiency and empowerment through its technological and service capabilities. It strives to be a valuable ally to the healthcare system, maintaining a strictly collaborative rather than competitive relationship with medical institutions.

In this model, the platform is responsible for technical capabilities and connecting patients with doctors, allowing hospitals and physicians to focus more on the delivery of medical services. In particular, 55% of Afu’s users come from third-tier cities and below. In these regions with relatively scarce medical resources, the platform can help healthcare institutions and doctors more efficiently reach users with genuine medical and health needs.

More importantly, the “Doctor in the Loop” (physician oversight) philosophy consistently advocated by Afu Doctor Edition inherently establishes a collaborative relationship with hospitals and physicians—AI serves to assist and enhance efficiency, while professional judgment and treatment decisions remain firmly in the hands of physicians. AI will never replace doctors; rather, it helps them work more reliably and with greater ease.

Whether it is medical services such as online consultations, AI-powered appointment registration, and health insurance payments connected via the platform, or the resource pool of 300,000 “HaoDF” doctors, as well as the world’s first realization of end-to-end connectivity and deep integration between patients and physicians, these factors significantly differentiate Afu from mere AI Q&A tools.

After more than a decade of development in internet healthcare, we have now entered the AI era. We also look forward to Ant Afu leveraging AI technology to truly become a handy tool for physicians, while continuing to deliver greater value to users and the industry.