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text/ jincuodao channel

"nobility is the epitaph of the noble." recently, someone commented that an internet medical company was sold to a company under ant group.

it is good doctor online (hereinafter referred to as "good doctor").

judging from what it has done in the 18 years since its establishment, the evaluation of "noble" does not seem to be an exaggeration.

since the inception of haodaifu, the goal of its founder wang hang has been to change the problem of misallocation of medical resources in china and the difficulty and high cost of medical treatment for ordinary people. to this end, he established the "three no principles" of not selling drugs, not opening offline hospitals, and not doing medical advertising.

wang hang, founder of good doctor

if the platform does not sell drugs, it will not prescribe more drugs for profit and will not repeat the risk of offline hospitals using drugs to support doctors.

the same is true for not touching offline hospitals and not doing medical advertising. wang hang said: "without our own hospital, the platform can truly stand from the patient's perspective and help them connect with the right doctors and hospitals."

even today, selling medicine is the only viable business model for internet healthcare. however, good doctor, which has experienced years of losses, layoffs and selling itself, has never wavered in its "three no principles."

but in the business world, noble is sometimes synonymous with naive.

an idealist who only treats patients and does not sell medicine.

a detail impressed lei jun

wang hang's motivation to establish haodaifu came from a bad medical experience.

it was the coldest time in beijing. he took his wife to do a prenatal check-up. he got up from home before 6 o'clock in the morning and lined up at the hospital. when the registration started at 7:30, he arrived at the registration hall and the staff told him: the specialist you registered for is not available today...

after a lot of complaints, wang hang immediately turned his complaints into entrepreneurial ideas: now it is the internet age, why can't this information be found on the internet?

in 2006, the entrepreneurial idea was realized.

at first, in order to expand the scale, he found several investors, but they all took a wait-and-see attitude towards this new thing. wang hang, who had experience in internet entrepreneurship, knew that only with the endorsement of a great person could he achieve twice the result with half the effort, so he thought of his friend lei jun.

lei jun chatted with him for more than ten minutes and thought, "i don't understand this industry, but it has good prospects, and your team is also good." in this way, he became an angel investor of haodaifu.

it is said that what made lei jun come to the conclusion that "your team can do it too" was due to something done by wang hang's team.

in the early days of the business, wang hang and his team visited hospitals every day, copied down doctors' visit information in the hospital lobby, entered it into the computer and posted it online. patients' evaluations of doctors were also obtained through on-site interviews.

they had no choice but to do manual labor. they originally wanted to use crawler technology to crawl content from hospital websites and make hospital yellow pages, but many official websites were updated two or three years ago; they wanted to discuss cooperation with hospitals, but small companies were not in the eyes of public hospitals.

they spent nearly two years "sweeping hospitals" and gradually collected information on doctors from all over the country.

as its influence grows, some patients can even get the doctor's "appointment plus" service through haodaifu.

however, good doctor is not in a hurry to commercialize, but instead sticks to the quality of medical services.

in wang hang’s vision, good doctor should be dianping.com is a website focusing on doctors and hospitals in the medical field.

therefore, the "three no principles" became the company's golden rules.

"if my family chooses a doctor, i hope the doctor will not prescribe more medicine because of vested interests. if i read a popular science article online, i hope it is not a soft article. i believe this is the medical service that everyone expects." wang hang believes that a good business model is not simply the pursuit of profit. a simple business, a business that can be trusted by everyone, is a good business.

in order to improve the quality of service, haodaifu is even willing to "offend" doctors.

even well-known doctors will have their accounts shut down if they commit serious violations. "what should i do next? i have to apologize one level at a time. if that doesn't work, i'll go and apologize myself," wang hang said.

in his opinion, haodaifu is not about creating a directory of chinese doctors, but about allowing doctors with similar ideas to work on one platform.

the somewhat idealistic idea led to a late start in the commercialization of good doctor. it was not until nearly five years after starting the business that they began to consider commercialization.

but at the same time, idealism won more investments, and haodaifu's valuation once reached tens of billions.

idealism has won the trust of many doctors and patients.

as of now, haodaifu has collected information on over 900,000 doctors from more than 10,000 hospitals across the country. its main businesses include doctor q&a, appointment registration, health information, doctor training, etc., and it has served more than 89 million patients in total.

a good doctor who "asks for trouble"

reality has given it endless suffering

the seemingly idealistic good doctor actually has serious thoughts on how to make money.

wang hang proposed the three-step concept for the internet medical industry in 2016.

the 1.0 era is called medical internet, which provides medical-related services such as light consultation and registration; the 2.0 era is the establishment of internet hospitals, which began to enter the diagnosis and treatment stage, and is also the key to achieving a balance between income and expenditure; the 3.0 era he calls it the construction of a controllable fee payment system, that is, through a membership system and the introduction of insurance, to provide personalized medical services for people with different incomes.

he always believed that the consumption concept of chinese people has begun to change, and paying for medical services is a sunrise industry.

however, the good doctor has not waited for this day to come yet.

most people are willing to pay for medicines, examinations and surgeries, but they always feel that paying for knowledge is not worth it.

therefore, the business model that is truly easy to make money is exactly what haodaifu abandoned from the beginning, that is, selling medicine, doing medical e-commerce, or helping pharmaceutical companies with medical advertising, holding academic training sessions, or relying on large insurance groups and having a natural supply of customers.

for example, in just three years, jd health’s pharmacy revenue exceeded that of the four largest listed drug retail chains. the cash cow businesses with the highest revenue share of ping an good doctor and ali health are also pharmaceutical e-commerce.

reality has proven that "selling medicine in the name of medical treatment" is a more practical way out.

xin lijun, former ceo of jd health, once admitted in an interview: "companies engaged in internet medical care in china that do not sell products are losing money."

even so, haodaifu still insists on the separation of medicine and pharmacy, and focuses on online consultation and medical services.

in this regard, wang hang explained: "offline hospitals have actually experienced the consequences of not separating medicine and medical care." in the view of good doctor, any medical institution, if it makes money from drugs, will eventually evolve into "promoting doctors to prescribe more drugs."

good doctors who "ask for trouble" on the road to commercialization can only work harder in other areas.

for example, based on multiple dimensions such as the amount of service provided by doctors on the platform, service depth, timeliness of responses, and satisfaction with responses, we publish lists such as "good doctor of the year" every year to continuously deepen users' trust in the platform.

another example is keeping up with the trend of artificial intelligence and launching ai triage solutions.

but all these actions are no match for the critical blow of reality.

zhang xi, vice president of good doctor, once cited an example. at that time, some domestic medical websites made considerable income by recommending doctors from private hospitals to patients and charging them fees. "we don't trust the level of doctors in such hospitals and never touch them. doctors in public hospitals work for the hospitals, so it is impossible to charge them."

there are many other reasons why the results have not gone as planned, such as some doctors are not interested in this kind of advisory rather than medical service, online consultations have not yet been widely included in medical insurance, etc.

the stubborn good doctor made many attempts, but in the end he only proved again and again the fact that the monetization efficiency of medical services is extremely inefficient.

gradually, investors lost their patience. wang hang once said in an interview: since the first half of 2022, he has frequently held meetings with shareholders of good doctor, and they asked him when they could exit and get the money.

it was also from 2022 that haodaifu began to lay off employees, and news of "selling itself" frequently came out.

even platform data is being openly sold on second-hand platforms.

not making money is the original sin, and no matter how dazzling the original halo is, it is destined to dissipate.

internet medical care collapsed halfway.

where exactly is the problem?

in fact, the fact that haodaifu survived for 18 years and was finally sold to a large company is already a good ending for an internet medical company.

like haodaifu, most internet medical companies are not very profitable and end up failing early.

baidu doctor only lasted for two years before shutting down, and tencent's tengai doctor only lasted three years. there are thousands of internet medical companies with the same fate.

internet medical care, which seems to be a beautiful concept, is stuck at which step?

taking haodaifu as an example, we can see many pitfalls in internet medical care.

for example, idealism is too strong, so that people are slow to realize many things.

good doctor, which has repeatedly suffered setbacks in commercialization, did not start exploring new businesses until the end of 2020. including when the mobile internet wave was coming, good doctor still focused on the pc side and did not embrace the mobile internet in time.

when they realize the problem, they may try all kinds of treatments.

good doctor does not do medical advertising, strictly speaking, it does not do advertising for patients, but in the past few years, it suddenly launched advertising for the general public to increase its popularity. good doctor's advertisements appear in prime locations with high passenger flow, such as airports, subways, office buildings, and elevators.

people familiar with the matter revealed that haodaifu spent tens of millions or even hundreds of millions on advertising, but it did not translate into commercial benefits, and only led to the conclusion that "medical care relying on advertising is not effective."

compared with the above, the biggest pitfall is misjudgment of the actual situation.

they want to change the mismatch of medical resources in the country, but doctors in china's first- and second-tier cities are already extremely busy and find it difficult to balance the needs of the platform, so high-end medical care is still difficult to reach the grassroots.

as a result, he became a doctor from a non-grade 3a hospital in a third-tier or lower city, treating young people in big cities, which was completely opposite to the original idea.

they want people to develop the habit of online medical consultations, but people will choose online medical care, either to buy medicine online or when they judge that there is nothing serious wrong with them.

this results in the disadvantage that the usage scenarios of internet medical care are relatively single.

finally, internet medical care cannot be easily replicated and promoted on a large scale like other internet businesses.

zhao heng, founder of latitudehealth, a healthcare strategic consulting firm, once said: "because of the offline nature of healthcare itself and china's public healthcare system, the internet can only revolve around the periphery and cannot go deeper, so it cannot develop a valuable business model."

li tiantian, the founder of dingxiangyuan, also has a similar view: the chain from medical care to health is a very long one. the closer it is to medical care, the more regulations there are, the higher the risks are, and the lower the degree of marketization is.

in the end, the biggest role of internet medical care is just connecting patients, which is limited.

subversion requires anti-traditionalism, but the more traditional the industry, the higher the threshold sometimes is.

conclusion:

under the report about good doctor selling himself, someone commented: "not selling medicine, only selling knowledge, a dead end."

in fact, selling oneself is not selling one's life. good doctor, who has had a bumpy journey, may have better development under the ant group.

to take a step back, even if it were to fail, the 18 years of good doctor's existence would not be without value.

in the comment section, many users shared their stories of using haodaifu.

wang hang also shared a story. one day, good doctor suddenly received two dinosaur eggs, and later learned that they were sent by an old man from henan. the old man had just returned home after surgery, and the doctor communicated with him remotely through good doctor's patient management program. the program would regularly remind the old man to exercise, take medicine, check up, etc. if the old man did not do it in time, someone would call to remind him.

"finally, the old man said, 'over the years, our son has never cared about me so much, so we would like to give these two dinosaur eggs that our family has treasured to you,' said wang hang.

as long as a product can be remembered and even recalled by users, no matter how unsuccessful its business is, it cannot be considered a complete failure.

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@The End

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| editor-in-chief | zhang yichi