China’s Tech Giants Take a Shot at Reinventing Health Care

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On the second floor of a new office building in downtown Beijing, rows of people with headphones sit five abreast, typing furiously. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts, they could easily be mistaken for office clerks or call-center workers—except for the white coats over the backs of their chairs and signs hanging overhead that read: “Internal Medicine,” “Pediatrics,” “Gynecology,” “Obstetrics.”.In one corner of this sprawling office sits Liu Sainan, a 47-year-old neurologist. In March, after 16 years at a top Beijing hospital, she joined Shanghai-based Ping An Healthcare & Technology Co., which runs the Ping An Good Doctor app. These days she treats patients via online messaging through the app, juggling as many as 10 people at once. Patients can also send pictures of symptoms, such as bruises, or their test results..Good Doctor, which is backed by the country’s top insurer, Ping An Insurance Group Co. of China Ltd., started a yearly subscription service in August that offers online medical consultations with senior doctors. Users pay an annual fee of 499 yuan to 1,999 yuan ($70 to $281) to consult specialists about everything from hypertension to the digestive problems of newborns—anytime and from anywhere..The business is an attempt to remake China’s overstretched health-care system for the internet era. The country’s technology industry has already transformed the way consumers shop, hail taxis, and order takeout meals. Now companies from Good Doctor to Alibaba to Tencent are attempting to do the same with health care. Their hope is to use digital services to reach patients frustrated with a public-health system that’s having trouble meeting demand for treatment during a national epidemic of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease..Online health care in China is poised to explode into a 198 billion-yuan business by 2026, or almost 20 times its 2016 size of 11 billion yuan, predicts researcher Frost & Sullivan. “Everyone in the business is exploring, and investors are watching, to see how internet health-care companies can make a profit,” says Good Doctor’s chief executive officer, Wang Tao. “We’ve figured out clearly that family doctor [service] will be the driver.”.Wang says his company aims to sign up 10 million families in the next five years and generate 10 billion yuan in annual revenue from them. That’s three times the company’s 2018 sales of 3.3 billion yuan, most of which came from online sales of health-care products and supplements. The company expects to become profitable by 2021..Across a busy street from Good Doctor’s Beijing office stands the more than 100-year-old Beijing Tong Ren Hospital, renowned for its ophthalmology and ear, nose, and throat departments. On a recent weekday, the ground floor of the outpatient building was teeming with people lining up to get an appointment with specialists. A search on a kiosk nearby showed that appointments for some senior doctors required a month’s wait..“Top hospitals in China are always crowded, and the experienced doctors there are preoccupied with treating basic diseases, whereas basic-level hospitals are underused,” says Sharry Wu, a Shanghai-based partner at Ernst & Young. “While government is making policies to guide patients to different tiers of health care, internet companies can help implement that through telemedicine.”.Still, there are limitations on what a doctor can do in cyberspace without meeting a patient. Among other regulations on cybermedicine, China doesn’t allow doctors to make an initial diagnosis via an online consultation, instead permitting only follow-up consultations and prescriptions, which can be with a different physician. “This is still an emerging area,” says Leon Qi, regional head of Asian financials research at Daiwa Capital Markets Hong Kong Ltd..China has an acute need for new health-care models. It adds almost 4 million cancer patients each year. It also had 114 million diabetes patients in 2017 and 290 million sufferers of heart disease last year—all among the world’s highest numbers..People cram into large public hospitals—which usually have the best doctors—for everything from simple colds to life-threatening cancers. And many of the best ones are in the more developed eastern part of the country, often many hours away from rural families. While there’s a top hospital for about every 550,000 people in Beijing or Shanghai, in the country’s western hinterland there’s just one for every 2.5 million people, according to data compiled by brokerage CSC Financial Co..Several technology companies are jumping in to fill that gap. WeDoctor, backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., said its online platform can potentially connect more than 200 million users to doctors from hospitals across the country. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.-backed Alibaba Health has signed up some 15,000 senior doctors to offer health consultation services via the internet for users of its online retail marketplace and its payment app Alipay..Despite widespread interest in online medicine, investors are still waiting for results. Good Doctor shares have declined 15% since its initial public offering last year. Other health-tech outfits have also had a choppy year, with Alibaba Health’s shares sliding 8% over the past 12 months, double the 4% drop of the Hang Seng Index..The industry could eventually get a boost from government policies. Beijing has taken some steps to make it easier to get public insurance reimbursements for some online health-care services, though local governments can decide what will be covered. And Good Doctor has already begun exporting its model overseas. It’s set up joint ventures with Singapore’s Grab Holdings Inc. and Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. to offer online treatment consultation services in Southeast Asia and Japan..Wang says Good Doctor has already hired about 100 doctors in China from well-known hospitals, offering annual compensation that can exceed 1 million yuan as well as stock options—a decent wage for mainland doctors. But delivering care over the internet can take some getting used to. “Senior doctors tend to be more prudent, and if I can’t see or touch the patient, it’s hard for me to definitively tell the patient’s condition, but I still have to offer clear advice to them,” says Liu, the neurologist. “It takes a lot of experience on the part of the doctor.”.Still, Liu says the service has an advantage traditional hospital consultation can’t rival: Patients can stay in touch easily with their doctors rather than wait months for the next available appointment. “The internet,” she says, “brings patients and doctors closer.” —Dong Lyu and Lulu Chen.To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Ellis at jellis27@bloomberg.net, Anjali Cordeiro.©2019 Bloomberg L.P..With assistance from Bloomberg

China’s Tech Giants Take a Shot at Reinventing Health Care

Businesses are offering on-call doctors for $70 annually in China’s overstretched health-care system.

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