Rhea Liu
Alibaba’s medical services platform, Ali Health, joined forces with Didi Kuaidi to launch Didi Doctor in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou last Saturday.
Users will now be able to call upon doctors via Didi Kuaidi’s ride-hailing app. After phone confirmation of basic information, doctors will visit users in a Didi Kuaidi vehicle. If diagnosis calls for further treatment and examinations, Ali Health and another partner, Mingyi Zhudao, or “Operating through Expert Doctors”, will arrange an express path to partner hospitals for users. Didi Doctor is currently offering a free trial service for October 18th and 19th.
Screenshots from Didi Chuxing
Didi Doctor is part of Ali Health’s recent expansion into the online medical services sector. Ali Health managed by CITIC 21CN, was originally China’s only pharmaceutical product monitoring system. Alibaba invested in CITIC 21CN last April and renamed it, Ali Health, last October. Ali Health now runs the Tmall Pharmacy, cloud hospital Yidiegu (“The Valley of Doctors”), together with the CITIC monitoring system.
Tmall Pharmacy just received its online medicine trading licence last month, which means Tmall now qualified to sell pharmaceutical products online to businesses.
Ali Health set up a partnership with Carestream Health in August to upgrade its “cloud hospital” – a cloud platform able to do medical diagnoses online by making use of large-scale data analysis now provided by Ali Yun’s cloud computing service. Carestream is a Canadian medical enterprise focusing on medical imaging technology and also a vendor to the U.S. Navy. Users will be able to seek medical consultations based on imaging diagnoses provided via “the cloud hospital.”
Baidu and Tencent have big investments in the online medical services sector. Baidu led a USD 40 million funding in Quyiwang, or Fun Doctor, in September. Tencent invested USD 70 million in Doximity-like social platform, Ding Xiang Yuan, which was reported to have over 4.5 million registered users last year.
According to iResearch, China’s online medical services market will be valued at RMB 17 billion (USD 2.7 billion) next year.