Medical portal aims to expand its platform

WeDoctor Holdings, a medical care portal backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd, plans to deepen cooperation with its partners Ylz Information Technology Co Ltd and Haixi Medicine Exchange, to facilitate the country's healthcare system reform to provide better healthcare to patients, one of its key executives said.

The three companies jointly launched a platform last month during the World Internet Conference that brings together healthcare professionals, medicine suppliers and financial institutions, to create an innovative and holistic healthcare provision and funding ecosystem.

For next move, the three companies will work together to further improve the platform, so that healthcare resources will be better used through application of big data technology, thus to improve healthcare efficiency and level up patient-centered healthcare service quality, said Kong Xiangpu, the company's senior deputy president.

The platform aims to help build a more efficient healthcare system that centers on health promotion, instead of merely treating diseases, he said.

Jiang Yu, a researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council, said that digitalization-based innovation will be helpful to improve current healthcare system only when all the healthcare-related resources, such as doctors, medicine supplies, and insurance funds can be well-connected and coordinated by a digital platform.

In 2017 patients made 1.73 billion visits to 2,340 top hospitals in China. That is to say, 21 percent of healthcare activities happened in 2.3 percent of the hospitals, according to healthcare authorities' statistics.