zhang ligang, who has been exploring the private medical examination industry for 20 years, is confident that ikang can reach a higher level
2024-09-20
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"song song song, i practiced this song by song muzi all night yesterday. i think song song's pronunciation is very distinctive, and i got the feeling as soon as i listened to it - i think there is a problem with his teeth occlusion. i suggest he go to our ikang dental center for an artificial intelligence dental examination." at the 2023 "ikang ai future night" talk show, zhang ligang, the founder, chairman and ceo of ikang group, was humorous like a traditional entrepreneur.
he will appear in variety shows in a high-profile manner, and is active in various interviews and charity activities. he also has a "standard" entrepreneur image. having founded aikang group 20 years ago, he is familiar with the disease trends, specific screening methods, and treatment methods of major chronic diseases such as cancer and elderly diseases such as alzheimer's disease. when talking about the future, he is confident that he can take aikang to a higher level, "i hope that within three years, we can cross the 10 billion yuan revenue threshold as soon as possible."
zhang ligang performed a talk show at the 2024 "aikang ai smart love night".
zhang ligang's crossroads
zhang ligang's learning and career experience is quite dramatic.
he was born in a rural area in jiangsu province. with the support of his family, he was successfully admitted to the department of biology at fudan university. however, in his junior year, he chose to drop out of school and go to study in the united states despite his parents' opposition.
after graduating from an american university and working for more than two years, zhang ligang was admitted to harvard graduate school and studied for a doctorate in genetics at harvard medical school. but soon, he chose to "turn around" again. in 1998, the internet was rising in china, and zhang ligang decided to give up his doctorate and return to china to start a business.
surprisingly, he did not choose the biomedical field he had studied for many years, but entered the emerging internet industry. after returning to china, zhang ligang worked with zhang chaoyang to work on sohu.com, serving as the first product development manager and director. just when he was about to be proposed as vice president, zhang ligang once again "retired bravely" - leaving sohu and co-founding elong.com with his partners in 1999, and pushing elong.com to the forefront of domestic travel websites a few years later. after elong.com experienced multiple capital changes at the selling and buying level, he chose to leave in 2003.
zhang ligang continued his entrepreneurial journey until 2004, when he combined his expertise with his interests to establish an internet medical platform, ikang.com, which marked the beginning of his 20 years of deep cultivation in health services. this was also the 20 years from the initial formation to the expansion of china's outpatient medical examination market.
as the aging process deepens and the public's health awareness awakens, health check-ups have gradually shifted to commercial check-ups of a preventive and health-care nature. at that time, medical institutions were generally crowded, and mechanisms such as medical insurance and separation of medicine and pharmacy were in the process of reform. the demand for check-ups that public hospitals could not fully undertake was seen by private check-up institutions, and more forces began to pour in.
in 2004, when aikon.com was founded, there were only a few private medical institutions. although the internet had become a hot topic, "internet + healthcare" had not yet formed a clear business model and was mostly limited to the application of online appointment registration. the public's attitude towards the commercialization of healthcare was also relatively vague.
in the field of medical services, zhang ligang is one of the few people with an internet background. he keenly sensed the prospects of the internet medical field. zhang ligang concluded that the income of the medical examination industry mainly comes from group customers, and the medical examination centers of public hospitals are difficult to meet the service needs of medium and large enterprises across regions. the advantages of private chain medical examination institutions are highlighted, and compared with public hospitals with rigid prices, the "one-stop" service provided by private medical examination institutions is more cost-effective. therefore, aikang.com initially adopted the model of providing one-stop medical examination outsourcing services for large enterprises, helping enterprises to find medical examination centers in hospitals across the country to place orders, and at that time aikang.com did not have its own medical examination center.
as the number of customers increased, zhang ligang made an important decision - to build his own offline medical examination center. ikang.com shifted from an internet-based asset-light model to an asset-heavy model that combines online and offline services. "after we gained customers by providing one-stop medical examination outsourcing services to large enterprises through the internet platform, we were faced with the embarrassing situation of having no place to place orders, because when the service provider (medical examination center) has scarce resources, it is useless to have traffic and customers. we were forced to go offline, and finally merged with shanghai guobin health checkup to become ikang guobin group," zhang ligang recalled in the interview.
in 2004, zhang ligang took a photo at the ikang.com headquarters in beijing’s jianwai soho.
"painstaking advice" for popularizing physical examination knowledge
compared with developed countries, china's health examination coverage rate is low. according to 2021 data, the number of health examinations in china exceeded 500 million, but when distributed to each person, the actual coverage rate of health examinations is less than 40%.
from talk shows to light comedies, zhang ligang tries to use forms that are popular with the public to dispel the dullness and difficulty of serious medical treatment, and often uses examples to "justify" the role of physical examinations in prevention. after years of deep cultivation in the health field, zhang ligang's greatest feeling about health is to prevent problems before they happen. whether in variety shows or interviews, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of regular physical examinations.
but along the way, zhang ligang felt that the public "still doesn't pay enough attention" to physical examinations. currently, the proportion of chinese people undergoing physical examinations is still low, and in recent years, malignant diseases have tended to be younger. according to his observation, in companies dominated by young people, even if there are free physical examinations provided by the company, the participation rate is still less than 100%, and in internet companies, the proportion is about 80%.
zhang ligang once again cited data to express his concerns: the probability of cancer development is 3‰, and the number of cancer cases in china is increasing every year. it is only a matter of time before the number exceeds 5 million each year.
zhang ligang analyzed that there are many factors behind the low proportion of physical examinations, the most significant of which is cost. with the deepening of aging, most retirees no longer have the benefit of annual physical examinations, and whether to pay for physical examinations depends on the individual's ability to pay. secondly, there is a lack of awareness of physical examinations. psychologically, most young people have a fluke mentality.
innovative technologies empower the physical examination industry
in recent years, artificial intelligence has sprung up like mushrooms after rain and is changing people's lives. zhang ligang, who came from the internet industry, believes that the emergence of ai will be an opportunity for industry change. zhang ligang said that for social medical institutions, medical experts are still a weakness to a certain extent. however, the application of artificial intelligence, big data and precision medical technology can largely make up for the lack of expert power and reduce dependence on expert power.
in the era of big models, what are the key breakthroughs of ai medical technology? what role does ai play in physical examination scenarios? zhang ligang used two examples to illustrate the application of ai in medical services. "in the ikang system, more than 1 million people undergo lung ct scans every year. doctors used to read the films, but now ai reads the films first and performs preliminary screening and grading, effectively assisting doctors in subsequent diagnosis. this can reduce errors in manual judgment and improve service efficiency.
aikang has also introduced ai technology in the screening and health assessment of bone and joints. zhang ligang said that millions of people in china need joint replacement surgery every year. before this, doctors mostly made judgments based on experience, and the surgery took a long time and caused a lot of bleeding, and they were not necessarily able to configure the most suitable model for the patient.
zhang ligang's father, who is now in his seventies, became the first customer to use this technology in the ikang system. his father completed a joint replacement surgery at an orthopedic hospital in shanghai with the help of ai analysis and planning. "now with ai, everything has become an open-book exam," said zhang ligang. ai can reconstruct the joint structure in three dimensions, thus providing a more perfect solution.
ai+medical care is highly anticipated, but it still cannot avoid the bottlenecks faced by the development of artificial intelligence - due to privacy protection and regulatory issues, in the field of medical imaging, high-quality annotated data is particularly scarce and expensive, and difficult to obtain. and for such complex medical model structures, the opacity of the ai decision-making process also raises concerns about the safety of ai diagnosis. therefore, for medical service institutions, on the one hand, the use of ai technology should still be more cautious; on the other hand, relevant medical data also needs to be used more "on the cutting edge."
in the interview, zhang ligang shared how they worked with ai technology companies to conduct artificial intelligence assessments of cognitive impairment through the retina, and used relevant case data to study methods for early screening of alzheimer's disease. apoe (apolipoprotein e) ε4 is a hereditary gene that significantly affects alzheimer's disease. zhang ligang cited data from a paper saying, "if a person has two copies of the apoe ε4 allele, his risk (of getting sick) will increase by 26 times compared to normal people. in may this year, a scientific team in spain published a study in nature medicine showing that for people with two copies of the apoe ε4 allele, almost everyone will get alzheimer's disease at a certain age, and it is no longer just an increased risk." according to the data provided by zhang ligang, among the approximately 3.49 million people who participated in apoe gene testing in ikang in the past, about 24,000 people carried two copies of the apoe ε4 allele, accounting for 0.69%, which means that this group of people will almost get alzheimer's disease at a certain age. the situation of no drug treatment has also been broken. in january this year, the national medical products administration approved a new drug for marketing in sync with international standards, and the value of this genetic test was also highlighted.
usually, diagnosis of alzheimer's disease requires extraction of cerebrospinal fluid or pet-ct, which is invasive and expensive. zhang ligang said that this year, aikang introduced a blood test based on microrna technology, which may be able to predict the risk of alzheimer's disease 5-7 years before the onset of symptoms. in the future, it hopes to combine ai, blood tests and gene testing technologies for medical research and explore scientific results that will benefit more alzheimer's families.
according to estimates by industry practitioners, ikang started applying these new technologies 3-5 years earlier than physical examination centers in domestic hospitals on average. according to public information, ikang began to apply genetic testing technology for early screening of colorectal cancer in 2016, and released the "white paper on colorectal cancer and precancerous lesions in chinese physical examination population based on molecular diagnosis" in 2020. a well-known tertiary comprehensive hospital in beijing only started providing the same testing service last year.
how can health services find a second growth curve?
with the deepening of aging and technological development, it is foreseeable that the physical examination industry will usher in a more rapid development stage, and competition will become increasingly fierce. when public hospitals fully implement centralized procurement, zero markup on drugs and consumables, and price limits on imaging diagnosis and other medical reform policies, public hospitals are also in urgent need of expanding high profits, and health examinations are one of the directions, which also brings challenges to private physical examination institutions. but in zhang ligang's view, if customers are screened for health problems in the physical examination center of a tertiary hospital, they will basically be directly recommended to the directly affiliated hospital for follow-up treatment, and rarely be recommended to other hospitals where the corresponding clinical departments are more proficient. but even though it is a comprehensive hospital, no tertiary hospital has the strongest departments. if a health problem is found during the aikang physical examination, aikang will help customers recommend and connect to the most suitable tertiary hospitals for various diseases for follow-up treatment after the examination.
when "low" prices and "low" services have become the norm, aikang, in addition to leveraging its integrated advantages in the field of science and technology and its platform advantages in cooperation with strong departments of major tertiary hospitals, is also looking for its own second growth curve. currently, physical examinations account for 80% of aikang's revenue. zhang ligang said that in addition to physical examinations, oral business will be the second largest offline business in the future. he gave a set of data: "according to our results, nine out of ten people who have oral examinations need treatment because chinese people's oral health (awareness) is relatively poor."
zhang ligang said, "i feel confident that i can take ikang to the next level. i hope that within three years, we can cross the rmb 10 billion revenue threshold as soon as possible."
by zhang xiulan
proofread by liu baoqing
photo/provided by the company
