Enhancing user viscosity, creating platform value, and forming differentiated competition are regarded as the three major battlefields of Internet enterprises. But when the scene involves medical treatment, does this play still hold? For Internet medical enterprises, how to open up the commercial closed loop of "traffic-service-realization"? How can I better serve the payer? These issues need to be explored continuously.
In the early days, many people believed that the so-called Internet medical treatment was nothing more than the transfer of simple medical services from offline to online, such as consultation, health consultation, drug sales, etc., which was only a supplement to traditional medical treatment. In essence, it is unable to provide users with high-quality medical services that are relevant to their core needs.
In the post-epidemic era, with the continuous improvement of health awareness in the whole society, users' recognition of Internet medical treatment is constantly strengthening. According to Accenture's 2021 Internet Healthcare Survey, nearly half of respondents have increased their use of Internet medical services compared to the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 90% of respondents are willing to choose online inquiries, online appointment registration and online drug purchase in the coming year, and more than 80% of respondents are willing to choose remote consultation in the coming year.
With the second half of Internet medical treatment, most of the head enterprises have experienced a round of business model adjustment, and they have shown a clearer and clearer path in terms of strategic layout and market planning.
On March 15, Ping An Health Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Ping An Health") released its 2021 annual report showing that during the reporting period, the company's revenue reached 7.334 billion yuan, an increase of 6.8% year-on-year. Among them, the revenue of medical services was 2.288 billion yuan, an increase of 8% year-on-year, and the revenue of health services was 5.046 billion yuan, an increase of 6.3% year-on-year.
With the implementation of the HMO health management + family doctor membership system + O2O medical service business model, ping an health's cumulative number of paid users in the whole year has grown rapidly to more than 38 million, and the conversion rate of paid users has increased to 24.8%.
Create a family doctor membership system to turn passive users into active users
Membership products can be regarded as a high-end version of ordinary subscription services, which is characterized by stronger user needs and higher professionalism of enterprises.
Generally speaking, the membership system is part of the customer loyalty program, the core is through the shaping of the sense of identity, as well as the provision of value-added services, so that the user's stickiness is improved, in addition, with the help of customer management system (CRM) and data management, can form a user's time series data, to provide users with a smoother contact experience, in the entire process of customer participation in medical services, to achieve a more smooth customer travel route.
At present, the membership products in the Internet medical market are represented by Livongo and Teladoc abroad and Ping An Health in China.
Livongo is a technology company that digitally manages chronic diseases, and its business model is based on B2B2C, the main customer is the enterprise that buys medical insurance for employees, while the insurance company and PBM (Drug Benefit Management) are the channel providers that help recommend customers, and the employees of enterprises that really enjoy Livongo's innovative services are called members.
Livongo's solution is a combination of hardware and software plus manual services, and four solutions have been launched so far – diabetes, hypertension, prediabetes and weight management, and behavioral cognition and stress management. Among them, the diabetes business accounts for more than 90% of the total revenue at present. The vast majority of Livongo's revenue comes from monthly subscription fees paid by businesses for members, which vary with the number of service options available.
Teladoc is the first and largest virtual telemedicine service provider platform in the United States. It provides users with a 7* 24 hours, any place through mobile devices, network, video and telephone services to seek medical help, the average waiting time is less than 10 minutes. Teladoc's charging model is two main, one is to provide virtual medical services to thousands of customers around the world through the B2B basis, or to provide services to consumers through channel partners, the main form is that the company pays a fixed monthly fee for its employees and their families or other beneficiaries, without limiting the number of consultations and consultation time; the other model is to charge for scattered members or individual customers.
The family doctor membership system launched by Ping An Health is based on "1 family doctor + 5 professional services + 1 member health file" as the core service content, matching the resources of five major scenarios of health management, sub-health management, disease management, chronic disease management and pension management for users on demand, helping each user generate a membership file covering its entire life cycle, coordinating and arranging medical and health-related services from online to offline; in addition, multi-level membership services will be provided to meet the medical and health requirements of users at different levels.
In the view of Fang Weihao, chairman and CEO of Ping An Health, the family doctor team can undertake traffic from various channels, solve user demands, establish trust between the platform and customers in the service, understand user needs in an all-round way, turn passive users into active users, and drive all kinds of users to use value-added products and services.
"Our own medical team and AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment system can quickly respond to user needs 24 hours a day, 7." Fang Weihao said that the more than 48,000 internal and external doctor teams and healthists, nutritionists and psychological counselors accumulated on ping an health platform can fully cover the multi-dimensional needs of users such as health, sub-health, disease, chronic disease, and pension.
By the end of 2021, Ping An Health's cumulative registered users reached 420 million, and the cumulative number of consultations also maintained its leading position in the industry, reaching 1.27 billion person-times. At the same time, the focus of customer acquisition channels has led to a rapid growth in the cumulative number of paid users throughout the year, exceeding 38 million, an increase of 6 million compared with the LTM data in the first half of the year.
Focus on the B-side and improve the C-side
The existence of payers who are willing to pay is the basis for the construction of business models. Who pays for family doctor membership services?
Fang Weihao believes that opportunities exist more in enterprises and insurance institutions. Because companies and insurance institutions are more willing to pay to improve the satisfaction of users and employees, products such as the family doctor membership system can allow companies to get a better perception in the minds of employees and more strengthen the brand of employers. At present, employee health management products on the market are generally simple and decentralized.
In the Internet medical market, one is a B-end customer and the other is a C-end customer.
Ping An Health Services' insurance and financial enterprises, mainly within Ping An Group, provide full-life cycle services for financial and insurance users by providing more collaborative medical and health service products.
As an important part of Ping An Group's HMO managed medical model and the flagship of the medical ecosystem, Ping An Health focuses on integrated financial channels and collaborates with Ping An Group to create a warm finance through a combination of financial + medical and health services, driving growth in the number of customers, customer stickiness, and customer recognition.
Taking Ping An Health's life insurance "Zhenxiang RUN" series of services empowering Ping An Insurance as an example, the medical and health rights and interests are internalized into the policy, so that users of critical illness insurance policies can enjoy high-quality medical and health services without additional fees.
The 310 million-person enterprise employee market is another focus of Ping An Health. Ping An Health has formed three major categories of products: employee physical examination, employee health management and corporate welfare exchange platform, and has created a number of cooperation projects with large central state-owned enterprises to enhance the secondary traffic conversion of enterprise employees in the Ping An health product system and promote the cross-sale of medical and health products.
"We also pay special attention to whether the B-side is willing to pay, whether it can promote the growth of C-end users, so that our C-side payment rate conversion rate can be more improved." Fang Weihao said.
In fact, this has been reflected in Ping An Health's performance in 2021.
In the past year, Ping An Health has adjusted its C-end strategy from focusing solely on quantity to quality, reducing the high-cost pan-traffic acquisition on the C-side, and segmenting medical solutions according to different user demands. With the help of AI tools, Ping An Health provides users with free and authoritative medical encyclopedia knowledge and online inquiries and other services, while fully implementing a paid system for online consultations and increasing the diversified service options for paid members and paid non-members. As a result, it not only achieves a wide coverage of the C-end customer base, but also effectively migrates the target users to individual paying users or members.
In terms of C-end service content, Ping An Health digs deep into the vertical field, adds a new special disease service package for the just needs of patients with specialized diseases, upgrades the diagnosis and treatment system, provides a flexible combination of rights and interests of member products, and improves post-diagnosis patient management. After the full implementation of paid consultation, the payment rate increased by 19.1 percentage points to 23.1%; the project transaction rate increased by 12.9 percentage points to 22.2%. At the same time, the overall five-star praise rate rose by 1.4 percentage points to 97.2%.
Fang Weihao said that as long as the direction is firm, whether it is in the B-end or in the C-end service continues to exert efforts, it will eventually form a flywheel effect, produce a positive cycle, and drive corporate profitability.
Image source: Figureworm Creative
Improve the O2O service network and build an integrated medical and health service platform
For the provider of medical services, there are three major pain points.
First, there is an imbalance between supply and demand resources. There is a shortage of more than 15 million health care workers in China, and general practitioners are very scarce. Due to the existence of this gap, 60% of the consultations are now concentrated in less than 10% of the top three hospitals; second, the resource use efficiency is very low, the average bed utilization rate is less than 50%; third, the market is relatively scattered, and the service supply and product supply of the medical market are more complex, so it reflects the characteristics of comparative segmentation.
Combined with the pain points and future needs of the industry, Ping An Health further deepened Strategy 2.0, taking the family doctor membership system as the entrance and navigator, and realizing traffic matching and integration in all scenarios through the service mode of "to line, to store, and home" and a perfect supplier management system.
As of December 31, 2021, Ping An Health has more than 3,600 cooperative hospitals, of which more than 50% are top-3 hospitals; the number of cooperative pharmacies has reached 202,000, with a national coverage rate of about 34%; the layout has exceeded 225 central warehouses, and 1 hour of drug delivery has been realized in 140 cities; The number of cooperative health institutions has reached 96,000, meeting the needs of users in a variety of offline performance scenarios and improving service links.
Relying on the platform's own medical capabilities and traffic advantages, Ping An Health strives to build ace physical examination projects, forming a closed loop of service of "pre-examination guidance + post-examination interpretation + solution", and the number of cooperative physical examination institutions has exceeded 1,700, covering 321 cities across the country, with an interpretation rate of more than 39% of physical examination reports.
"Through the open platform, as well as the compensation for our own service breakpoints, the improvement of service experience can make very serious medical behaviors provide better services to users in this process with quality and quantity." Fang Weihao said that such O2O services are the direction and key to be extended by Ping An Health in the next step.
Source: Health Community
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