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2024.08.15

Word count: 3304, reading time: about 5.5 minutes

Introduction: According to people familiar with the matter, the valuation of Haodaifu Online has been declining over the past year, and the final acquisition price may be in the hundreds of millions of yuan.

Source |Health News Consulting

Recently, Jianwen Consulting learned from multiple sources that Ant Group is planning to acquire Good Doctor Online. Previously, the company that negotiated the acquisition with Good Doctor Online was Ali Health, a sister company of Ant Group, but recently, people close to Ant Group revealed that the current negotiating party has changed from Ali Health to Ant Group.

Currently, when you open the medical and health channel on the Alipay homepage and select "Online Consultation", you can see the words "Good Doctor". After clicking to enter, the content presented on the page is exactly the same as the "Expert Consultation" interface in the Good Doctor Online APP. An insider of Alipay's medical and health business confirmed to Jianwen Consulting that the two parties had reached a relevant business cooperation at the end of June this year.

"Health News Consulting" contacted Ant Group and Haodaifu Online to verify the relevant information, but as of press time, no response was received from both parties.

In the past two years, there have been frequent rumors that Internet giants are interested in acquiring Good Doctor Online. Health News also reported that Ali Health is negotiating to acquire Good Doctor Online. According to people familiar with the matter, the valuation of Good Doctor Online has been declining over the past year, and the final acquisition price may be in the hundreds of millions.

Founded in 2006, Haodafu Online is a leading online medical consultation platform. At its peak, it had more than 1,000 employees and was valued at nearly 10 billion yuan. As a company that lacks its own hematopoietic ability, Haodafu Online's team has been greatly reduced in recent years. Since then, the company has tried several commercial transformations, but none of them achieved the expected results.

"The core resource of Good Doctor Online is tens of thousands of active famous doctors, which is a good traffic-generating tool for the platform." Tu Honggang, chairman of Yiku and a senior researcher in the pharmaceutical industry, told Jianwen Consulting that compared with Ali Health, Alipay has stronger platform attributes and more channels for traffic monetization, so it can make some longer-term plans and does not have to rely on short-term business to make money.

For Good Doctor Online, it is difficult to continue to sail on its own. Being acquired by a large company is the best solution for old shareholders, the founding team, company employees, and medical users on the platform.

Hold on till the last moment

Open the medical and health channel on the Alipay homepage and select "Online Consultation" to enter the entrance to Alipay's medical and health business - the consultation section.

On this page, whether it is the top-pinned "Quick Consultation", "Ask an Expert", "Special Free Consultation" and "See a Chinese Medicine Practitioner", or the special services listed by specialty below, they all ultimately lead to Ali Health's Internet Hospital platform, which is also the conventional design of Alipay's online consultation business.

The biggest change is in the ad space in the middle of the page - three conspicuous red words "Good Doctor" with a white background and blue pattern, which is quite similar to the design style of the Good Doctor Online APP. After clicking in, the content presented on the page is exactly the same as the "Expert Consultation" interface in the Good Doctor Online APP, with the same doctors, the same order, and even the avatar photos, personal profiles, user ratings, and consultation prices are exactly the same.

In other words, the expert information and platform data of Haodaifu Online have been moved to the Alipay Medical Health Channel, becoming a new entrance to the Alipay medical ecosystem.

"The core resources of Haodaifu Online are hundreds of thousands of doctors, tens of millions of users and a huge database accumulated over 18 years of operation." A senior practitioner in the Internet medical industry said that Haodaifu Online has been depreciating over the years, mainly because it has not found a profit model, but the value of these online resources always exists.

An inappropriate piece of evidence is that some self-media recently revealed that the data of Haodafu Online was publicly sold on a second-hand platform. Haodafu Online responded that the information spread online was untrue, and Haodafu attached great importance to data security and had sent a lawyer's letter to the other platform.

In addition, the situation of Good Doctor Online, which has experienced a significant reduction in staff, is not optimistic. An investor who recently participated in the negotiation to acquire Good Doctor Online told Jianwen Consulting that from the due diligence, the actual situation of Good Doctor Online is more difficult than they expected, whether it is the number of active users, platform operation capabilities, or network infrastructure. "To put it bluntly, there is no manpower and cost to support it, and it can only barely maintain."

An insider familiar with Good Doctor Online expressed a different view. In his opinion, for Good Doctor Online, which is seeking mergers and acquisitions, maintaining daily operations with the least labor cost is already the best strategy. "After laying off 50 or 60 people, Good Doctor actually entered a profitable state. Although it has little practical significance for the company, it is helpful in facilitating the final transaction."

As of press time, general outpatient clinics and expert consultations on the Haodaifu Online APP are operating normally, and the online free clinic live broadcast is scheduled for 5 days later.

Alipay returns to the Internet medical track

As the vanguard of Alibaba's "Double H Strategy", Alipay entered the medical and health landscape as early as 2014.

At the beginning of 2014, Alibaba spent 1.3 billion yuan to acquire CITIC 21st Century, obtaining the qualification of a third-party platform for online drug sales. In May of the same year, the "Future Hospital" plan, which was personally managed by Alipay, was officially launched. The name is very cool, and it can be summed up in one sentence: "Moving the hospital's registration, payment and inquiry services to mobile phones."

Looking back, Alibaba's exploration and layout in healthcare to this day are inseparable from the two main lines established in 2014. The former corresponds to medical e-commerce, which is a business direction that matches Alibaba's own genes. The latter attempts to reshape the medical process through Internet technology and improve the efficiency of diagnosis and treatment.

With Alibaba's resources as a backer, the "Future Hospital" project progressed smoothly, with 10 hospitals launched in three months, including top tertiary hospitals such as Beijing Friendship Hospital and Zhejiang University Affiliated Shaw Hospital. A year later, Alipay released the "Future Hospital One-Year Service Data Report" in a high-profile manner, announcing that more than 200 hospitals had joined the project, with an average of one hospital joining every two days.

What the PR article does not mention is that even though the "future hospital" has solved some convenience issues during its implementation, there is still an insurmountable gap between the expectations of both doctors and patients - medical insurance payment. Since it is impossible to connect to medical insurance for real-time settlement, most patients cannot complete the entire process of medical treatment and payment in the "hospital on mobile phone".

Although Alipay has tried to launch a variety of quasi-real-time medical insurance settlement methods such as "pre-authorization payment", "self-payment first and then refund", "treatment first and then payment", no matter which method, the offline medical insurance identity confirmation step cannot be omitted. Therefore, the actual promotion effect of "Future Hospital" is not good - only 5 people at most use this service in a tertiary hospital in Wuhan per day, and Beijing Friendship Hospital terminated the cooperation 3 months after the launch and removed the relevant promotional posters.

This experience was not a pleasant one for Alipay, which was new to the medical sector. They soon realized that healthcare is an industry that requires reverse deduction. Only when the medical insurance payment at the very end is resolved will the previous process be reshaped.

Therefore, for a long time afterwards, Alipay revolved around medical insurance payment vouchers, and other comprehensive Internet medical and health businesses were assigned to the newly established Ali Health. Alipay, which returned to its old business, quickly found a breakthrough. In 2016, it cooperated with the Shenzhen Human Resources and Social Security Bureau to launch medical insurance cardless payment, participated in the formulation of medical insurance electronic voucher standards in 2018, and assisted the National Medical Insurance Bureau in launching the country's first medical insurance electronic voucher in 2019...

As of now, Alipay has a penetration rate of two-thirds of all channels for medical insurance electronic certificates. In recent years, Alipay has launched LOT-based face-scanning payment, online payment for follow-up visits and prescriptions for chronic disease patients, and medical insurance family accounts. Based on this huge entry effect, Alipay's medical and health business has always been in a state of rapid growth.

In October 2023, online medical insurance drug purchases, which started in Shanghai, quickly expanded from dozens of pharmacies to thousands of pharmacies, and then swept across the country. Shenzhen even launched a pilot program of "online medical insurance drug purchases using unified funds", which brought great convenience and benefits to the people.

But whether it is Meituan, Ele.me or JD Health, these O2O drug purchasing platforms themselves do not have the qualifications for medical insurance payment, and the vast majority of orders must go through Alipay to activate and authorize medical insurance electronic certificates.

In a media exchange at the beginning of this year, Alipay said that the number of users who have activated the medical insurance code through Alipay has reached nearly 600 million, with more than 200 million monthly active users and 13 million medical services used every day. "At present, this scale is already very large. Next, we hope to provide more medical and health services and make Alipay a real one-stop service platform for medical and health," said Zhang Junjie, general manager of Alipay's medical and health division.

Perhaps we can understand it this way: Alipay, which has completed its "leveling up" in medical insurance payment, has returned to the broader Internet medical track.

In Alipay's plan, the future medical and health business is divided into three parts, namely convenient payment tools, medical and drug purchasing assistants, and medical and health butlers. On the payment tool side, they hope to be able to access the commercial insurance system and truly realize the one-code payment for medical insurance, commercial insurance, and self-paid.

In the two branch tasks of medical treatment and drug purchase assistant and medical health steward, in addition to conventional online consultation and health science popularization, Alipay has also combined large models and AI technology to launch the country's first digital human "Anzhener" that can accompany patients for consultations, which runs through the entire process before, during and after the patient's consultation. As an upgraded version of the "Future Hospital" plan, the digital human's interactive interface is simpler and more friendly, and the scenarios have also extended from in-hospital diagnosis and treatment to health management outside the hospital.

"This year, Alipay has a strong momentum in its layout of medical services." A senior practitioner in the Internet medical industry told Health News Consulting that from the perspective of Alibaba, Ali Health has strategically abandoned the medical business and focused on pharmaceutical e-commerce, which has given Alipay more room for expansion. "In the past, when people mentioned Alipay's medical business, the first reaction was the electronic medical insurance certificate, but as far as I know, Alipay is eager to break this inherent impression."

With the brand support of Good Doctor Online, will Alipay Medical’s return be smoother?

WeChat Editor| 73