A Growth Engine for the Group Empowered by World-leading Healthtech
HONG KONG and SHANGHAI, Sept. 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. (hereafter "Ping An" or the "Group", HKEX: 2318; SSE: 601318) unveiled its healthcare ecosystem strategy and world-leading healthtech achievements at an Investor Day in Shenzhen. Jessica Tan, Co-CEO of Ping An, Fang Weihao, Acting Chairman and CEO of Ping An Good Doctor, Geoff Kau, Co-President of Ping An Smart City and CEO of Ping An Smart Healthcare, and Xie Guotong, Chief Healthcare Scientist of Ping An, delivered keynote presentations.
"The health care ecosystem is one of Ping An Group's long-term core strategies. With more than 20 years of effort and investment in the health care sector, Ping An has developed into a leading health care enterprise in China. We aim to establish strong technological competition entry barriers by building a closed loop ecosystem of health care services. We are committed to supporting the development of a healthy China; improving people's health, seizing market opportunities, and creating greater value," said Ms Tan.
The development of Ping An's healthcare ecosystem is based on three considerations, Ms Tan said. First, the immense healthcare market in China is expected to grow from RMB6 trillion in 2019 to RMB16 trillion in 2030, due to significant demand and a supportive policy and regulatory environment. Second, the Ping An healthcare ecosystem will generate strategic synergies as a comprehensive range of health care services can be provided efficiently and tailored for different segments. This will leverage ecosystem resources, establish technological competition entry barriers, and differentiate the Group's core financial and insurance businesses with tailored life insurance products. Ping An is already a leading health care enterprise in China, with a strong traffic portal, a comprehensive online and offline service network and world-leading healthtech.
Ping An is developing a closed-loop health care ecosystem that includes government, patients, medical service providers, social and commercial health insurers and technology to create a new growth engine for the Group. The Ping An health care ecosystem has a three-pronged strategy: 1) to expand user traffic, managing organizations for the insurers, and empowering service providers to maximize value; 2) to pursue vertical integration through serving the government, harnessing the resources of hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies, and empowering members of the ecosystem with technology to create competitive barriers; and 3) to create synergies with Ping An's core financial businesses to acquire customers, enhance customer stickiness, and increase average value per customer.
Strategy: Build an ecosystem with enhanced user experiences and technology
The challenge of dealing with the aging population in China has revealed a number of pain points in the health care ecosystem. In response to the national strategy "Healthy China 2030", Ping An has accelerated its development at the frontier of health care and revised its health care ecosystem strategy.
The five components in the strategy of Ping An's health care ecosystem encompass government, patients, medical service providers, social and commercial health insurers and technology. Ping An Smart Healthcare serves the government and offline health care service providers. Ping An Good Doctor focuses on patients and online health care service providers. Ping An Life, Ping An Annuity, Ping An HealthKonnect and Ping An Health serve payers, and Ping An Health Technology Research Institute provides world-class artificial intelligence technology to continuously improve health care service quality and efficiency.
Ping An allocates 1% of its annual operating income to research and development of innovative technologies, and a large portion is invested in healthtech. Ping An Health Technology Research Institute has established one of the world's largest health care databases with the second largest number of healthtech patent applications globally, and technology that has won six international medical imaging competitions. The database covers more than 30,000 diseases, more than 1 billion medical consultation records and over 300 million applications.
"In the past, Ping An's health care segment was divided into a few segments at the corporate level, to specialize in particular areas. Following the restructuring and the upgrade of our health care ecosystem strategy, the segment is now moving towards 'integration and closed loop'. With well-defined roles for each member, we will be able to partner and complement one another in strengthening our ecosystem," Ms Tan said.
Ping An Good Doctor is a pillar of Ping An's health care ecosystem, with a mission to create the largest and most advanced internet health care service platform in China. Since mid-2020, Ping An Good Doctor has been focused on a strategic upgrade, especially online health care services and its integration with offline services. During the Investor Day, Ping An Good Doctor launched its new service brand "Ping An Doctor Home", a professional doctor-patient communication channel.
Ping An Good Doctor provides diagnosis and treatment for over 3,000 common diseases, the largest proprietary doctor service community in China and has also established a huge offline service network. As of June 30, 2020, Ping An Good Doctor had 346 million users, with more than 1,800 medical and nursing practitioners and nearly 10,000 health care experts across the country. It has the largest offline service network, partnering with 110,000 pharmacies, 49,000 clinics and over 2,000 medical examination centres. In the first half of 2020, Ping An Good Doctor's operating income increased by 21% year on year to RMB2.75 billion, of which revenue from online health care surged by 107% to RMB695 million.
Ping An Smart Healthcare, affiliated to Group subsidiary Ping An Smart City, focuses on four core areas to support the rapid development of China's health care system: improving institutional management by empowering health and medical authorities; assisting doctors in diagnosis and treatment; supporting the public health system to manage epidemics and chronic diseases; and facilitating pharmaceutical research. The deployment of its smart image reading system has helped to substantially shorten diagnosis times from 15 minutes to 15 seconds. Currently, Ping An Smart Healthcare services are available in 90 Chinese cities and are expanding in overseas markets, serving a total of 20,000 medical organizations and 450,000 doctors.
Ping An's health care ecosystem plays a key role in growing the Group's core financial business. Between 15% and 20% of Ping An's new financial customers are acquired from the health care ecosystem every year. Contracts per financial customer that use the health care ecosystem services is 3.1, compared to 2.0 for non-users. The assets under management (AUM) of financial customers served by the health care ecosystem is approximately RMB10,000, compared to RMB5,600 for non-users. The synergy between Ping An's health care ecosystem and its core financial business will be further enhanced through products, traffic, services and technology.
Ping An Good Doctor launches "Ping An Doctor Home" for doctors and patients
Ping An Good Doctor launched a new service brand Ping An Doctor Home at the Investor Day. Fang Weihao, Acting Chairman and CEO of Ping An Good Doctor, said that Ping An Doctor Home is a hub for private doctors and family doctors. Ping An Doctor Home will ensure Ping An Good Doctor consolidates its leading position in the sector, spearhead product upgrades and set trends in the industry, and accelerate business development horizontally and vertically.
Ping An Doctor Home will be able to offer a multi-tier membership system for health butler services for individuals and families linking them to doctors covering different services and needs. It will completely upgrade the doctor's workbench helping and empowering doctors in their medical technical and management and promotion needs. The service establishes the world's largest doctor ecosystem by combining the four-tier doctor system of AI doctor assistants, resident corporate doctors, external contracted experts and leading specialists. Doctors will be recommended to patients based on need and work efficiency will be enhanced with the new audio and video consultation functions and the integration of online and offline resources. Ping An Doctor Home will also upgrade insurance coverage, to improve the level of health care security and secure peace of mind of both doctors and patients.
Ping An Doctor Home spearheads Ping An Good Doctor's mission to build a professional doctor-patient communication gateway based on trust, professionalism and convenience, thus creating the largest, most advanced and competitive internet health care platform in China, said Mr Fang.
Smart healthcare empowers government
Ping An Smart Healthcare provides end-to-end solutions for regulatory authorities and the health care ecosystem by supporting the government with management of institutions, doctors, diseases and drugs to drive efficient operation of China's health care system.
Geoff Kau, Co-President of Ping An Smart City and CEO of Ping An Smart Healthcare, said that its technology offerings include: a portal for offline health care services, to improve hospitals' core operations and the AskBob intelligent database, a Bloomberg-like medical database for doctors. Ping An Smart Healthcare services strengthens the public health system to respond to epidemic emergencies, by providing a chronic disease management platform to facilitate early detection, treatment and recovery. The service also supports medical drug development, quality control and centralized procurement.
Mr. Kau said Ping An's smart healthcare business has been expanding rapidly, spanning more than 90 cities in China and Southeast Asia, covering more than 20,000 medical institutions, and serving over 450,000 health care practitioners on nearly 300 million service calls. With Ping An Smart Healthcare, Singapore's Singhealth, American medical cloud computing company Arterys, Romania's Matei Bals Hospital and medical institutions in Indonesia have launched scientific research collaboration to improve the quality and efficiency of their services.
Building A World-Leading Technology Health Care System
Xie Guotong, Chief Healthtech Scientist of Ping An, introduced the Group's world class health care database with five libraries: diseases, health care products, prescription treatment, medical resources and personal health. The disease library contains 100,000 disease concepts and 420,000 disease terminologies. The health care product library contains 180,000 drug manuals and 84,000 Chinese medicine prescriptions. The prescription treatment library contains 150,000 prescription formulas and 30 million medical documents. The medical resource library contains 500,000 Chinese doctors and 2.2 million scientific researchers. The personal health library contains 1 billion diagnoses and information on treatment.
The Company enjoys the technological differentiation with its leading algorithm-training platform. The Company's Saifei platform supports large-scale parallel experiments, which can reduce project workloads by 30% to 50% through intelligent scheduling and allocation of computing resources, increase prediction speed three to six times, accelerate calculations by 100 times, and reduce memory consumption by 23% through intelligent dispatch and allocation of computing resources. The Company's health care algorithm models can effectively boost R&D efficiency by five to eight times.
Dr. Xie said Ping An has developed one of the world's leading intelligent diagnosis assistance platforms. It has developed the world's largest chronic disease management platform and the world's largest health care database. The company has the world's second-largest number of patent applications for health care technology. This knowledge is applied extensively through Ping An's "medical brain" to support artificial intelligence decision-making.
