Yu Gang, co-founder of 1 Pharmaceutical Network: The barriers in the pharmaceutical and health industry are extremely high, and technology is the most important driving force for development

Per reporter: Xu Libo Per editor: Wen Duo

On December 20th, the 10th China Listed Companies Summit Forum Week 2021 hosted by the Daily Economic News kicked off, as one of the most influential high-end economic forums in China, this year's China Listed Companies Summit Forum took "Scientific and Technological Innovation and Green Development" as the theme, echoing the new characteristics and new pattern of China's current economic development.

At the 2021 China Pharmaceutical and Health Capital Forum, an industry forum held on the afternoon of December 22, Yu Gang, co-founder and executive chairman of 1 Pharmaceutical Network, delivered a keynote speech with the theme of "Technology is an important driving force for the development of the pharmaceutical and health industry".

In the post-epidemic era, the overall pattern of the pharmaceutical and health industry is still being reshaped. In Yu Gang's view, the most important driving force for the development of the entire pharmaceutical and health industry is still science and technology. This includes four aspects: Internet technology, cloud services, wearable devices, and big data.

The industry pain point behind the "sunrise industry"

Yu Gang called the pharmaceutical and health industry an industry that will always shine. The scale of the medical and health track is large and the development speed is fast, and in the past and even the next ten years, it will grow at a rate of more than ten percent, and within ten years, the pharmaceutical and health industry will surpass real estate and automobiles and become the largest industry in China. Yu Gang analyzed: "At the same time, medicine and health is an industry empowered by science and technology, and the policy barriers and industry barriers are extremely high."

But at the same time, Yu Gang also saw that the other side of the industry is extremely fragmented, inefficient and has many pain points.

First, he cited a set of data showing that there are currently more than 6,000 pharmaceutical companies, more than 14,000 distributors and 550,000 pharmacies in China, and even the largest chain pharmacies account for no more than 2% of the overall domestic market share. In contrast, the top three U.S. pharmacy chains account for more than 85 percent of the U.S. market. From the production of drugs to the delivery, due to the fragmentation of multiple levels of circulation, a lot of cost and time is directly consumed.

In addition, he mentioned that for pharmaceutical companies, the most important pain point is that it is difficult to achieve broad market coverage and lead to a significant shortening of the life cycle of drugs. New drugs are constantly being introduced, how to let doctors know about these drugs, how to penetrate the 3 to 6 lines of cities and even villages... Finally, making drugs accessible is an urgent problem that pharmaceutical companies need to solve.

In addition, he found that for patients, the pain point is that it is difficult to see a doctor and it is expensive to buy medicine. An average of 3 hours to see an outpatient clinic, of which the real communication time with the doctor is only six or seven minutes, the examination time is half an hour, and most of the time is wasted on the road and waiting process, which can be said to be a huge waste of social resources.

Technology is the most important driver of development

In Yu Gang's view, the most important driving force for the development of the entire pharmaceutical and health industry is still science and technology. This includes four aspects of technology: Internet technology, cloud services, wearable devices, and big data.

The advantage of Internet technology is that it is not limited by space, time and shelves, and in the context of the epidemic, it can avoid cross-infection of physical hospitals and clinics, and can also achieve services at any time, anywhere and anywhere through mobile Internet. But on the other hand, offline consultation is still unable to be replaced, Internet technology is currently unable to achieve the detection of physical equipment, but also difficult to achieve professional diagnosis of doctors such as Wangwen Qingche. Therefore, Yu Gang believes that the future will be an organic integration of online and offline.

Yu Gang believes that the existing digital technology is constantly developing in a comprehensive, accurate and timely direction, and through the collection of these real-time data, a large number of medical services can be digitized, such as electronic cases, electronic prescriptions, and the storage and transmission of various types of images (X-ray, C T, ECG, ultrasound, etc.). In addition, the SaaSization of various management functions also empowers participants in the ecosystem such as medicine and pharmacies, ultimately helping doctors to deeply understand the patient's situation and make more accurate judgments and decisions.

Big data makes it possible to "thousands of faces", provide personalized services for every patient, and greatly improve conversion rates and achieve precision marketing.

Yu Gang concluded that digital technology is changing the way people access medical and health services, the pharmaceutical and health industry is undergoing profound changes, and the continuous progress of science and technology will create unlimited possibilities.

Daily economic news