Prognosis
A $6 Billion China Startup Wants to Be the Amazon of Health Care
By- WeDoctor leverages user data for marketing to drug makers
- Billion-dollar startup backed by Tencent, AIA, New World
As soon as you’re diagnosed as diabetic, ads for treatments show up on social feeds. You get alerts on health supplements, maybe nutrition tips. Prompts on insurance policies pop up on your phone.
That’s not a scene from Minority Report. It’s a manifestation of the trove of data harnessed by WeDoctor, one of China’s most richly valued online health outfits, in an ambitious quest to upend the business of personal care. The ads may not be conspicuous -- they can be buried within a pitch about chronic diseases -- but the target is uncannily precise: you.
Backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., WeDoctor joins a growing contingent of tech giants hoping to revolutionize an industry seemingly impervious to online disruption. While the likes of Google seek to unlock the secrets of immortality or unravel medical mysteries, WeDoctor’s focusing on something more pragmatic: making money by unclogging bottlenecks in a Chinese health care market slated to hit 8 trillion yuan ($1.2 trillion) by 2020.
Jerry Liao Jieyuan
Source: WeDoctor
Founded by artificial intelligence maven Jerry Liao Jieyuan in 2010, WeDoctor’s ambitions are nothing short of an Amazon for health care. Once a scrappy startup that helped people book doctors, it’s grown into a outfit valued at $5.5 billion that operates online follow-up consultations, drug prescriptions and actual clinics staffed by physicians. It’s building AI to parse data, helping detect ailments like cervical cancer. It sells an Amazon Echo-like $600 speaker for the home that can link to fitness wearables and doubles as a doctors’ hotline.
In Chinese fashion, it’s even concocted a game out of treating maladies: a function that helps sufferers ask questions and reward the best answers. To fund all that, WeDoctor’s counting on an IPO as soon as 2019.
“AI won’t replace doctors but it will become an important tool for doctors and help improve their efficiency and accuracy,” Liao, also a co-founder of speech-recognition specialist iFlytek Co., said in an written response to questions. “Through the internet and AI, China’s health care services will improve significantly in the next five to 10 years.”
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