Ep. 64: Telemedicine in China in the time of COVID-19: Part 2

Hey everyone, how are you doing? We hope you’re healthy and safe! Here in the Bay Area, shelter-in-place has been extended to May 3, so we’ll be staying home until then.  Meanwhile, we were told that podcast listens are down since social distancing began, since people aren’t commuting or going to the gym. So, we are going to experiment with a few things in the next month. 

The first is a webinar series for investors. Our first one is on Monday April 6th, from 5-6PM PST. If you’re an investor interested in how luxury retail in Asia -- mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and even parts of Southeast Asia -- have been impacted by COVID19, please tune in for an interactive session. Go to techbuzzchina.com/webinar and fill out our form. The webinar is free, but we have an upper limit on capacity, so sign up now!

If you have other ideas for us, let us know. We have looked into a variety of things but would love to know what you think is most interesting. Maybe you want to see us debate someone else on a Kuaishou livestream? Maybe a virtual happy hour for Tech Buzz listeners? Let us know, if enough people request it, we’ll definitely consider it!

Meanwhile, today’s episode is a continuation of last time, when we took you on a journey through China’s healthcare system. Not a really deep journey, because the system is just so, so vast, but hopefully an informative one. If you haven’t listened to Episode 63, though, you should probably stop and do that right now because a lot of things aren’t going to make much sense until you do. 

Each country’s healthcare system is its own beast and you won’t be able to understand why the telemedicine companies operate as they do until you know the business and regulatory context in which they have to operate. Consumer behaviors are also going to seem counterintuitive. But, understand the basic constraints of the system, and you can get a sense of why things work as they do. 

But things are also not static. As we mentioned last time, the government has made a few changes to its rules for this sector over the years, but the epidemic has really accelerated development for this sector,  and they made three announcements in the past two months alone. It was mostly to confirm and clarify their positions, but policies are being refined quickly, so there is a lot of excitement in this space.Will it be enough to guarantee commercial success though? The company we covered last episode, Ping An Good Doctor, isn’t yet profitable despite having the backing of the largest insurance company in the world. What are some of the other experiments people have tried and how have they worked out? We’ll talk briefly today about competitors like 春雨医生 Chunyuyisheng, 好大夫, WeDoctor, and 丁香园 Dingxiangyuan. 

And also efforts by the big internet companies in this space -- what do Ali, Baidu, and JD Health all do?  Oh and hint, one company in particular has invested in 3 of the companies we just named. You can probably guess who. Anyway, after this epidemic ends, because it inevitably will, what will happen to this sector? Will it have enjoyed a permanent boost? How big will that boost be? Does it mean Chinese healthcare is changed forever? Or nah, not really? So many questions! To get our take, listen on and find out!

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Again, if you haven’t listened to Episode 63, which was Telemedicine Part 1, stop here before going further. If you have already, then you’ll remember all the systemic reasons and statistics we gave on why China has a huge lack of doctors, compared to Western developed countries. About half as many on a per capita basis, actually, and some of the main reasons were the lack of pay, grueling hours, and distrust, even violence from angry patients.

This disparity in the supply of healthcare professionals versus the demands of a 1.4Bn population is what brings us then, to our first company, WeDoctor, 微医, formerly known as 挂号网 and still using the URL guahao.com.  Founded in 2010, Guahao means to “take a number.” Specifically, it means to take a number and stand in line, in this case, to see a doctor or specialist. 

And that’s literally what the business was, for a long time. You see, the supply and demand disparity meant that even if you got to the hospital very early, as soon as it opened, you weren’t necessarily guaranteed an appointment. If you read news from any time before 2010, you’ll find that people would have to line up really early in the morning, like at 4am, or even the middle of the night, to be seen. 

It was such a common issue that people would joke how 挂号 was just one of those uniquely Chinese sufferings, the cost of being a Chinese person that no one could really escape. I mean, I think they’re joking. But it was obviously super frustrating. But it seemed fair, at least. Kind of. You couldn’t really jump the queue.  What you could do though, was to buy a number off of a scalper who did all the line-standing for you.

黄牛 to the rescue! These scalpers would somehow get a number for you and then resell it to you for something like $30 to $150 per pop, even more than that for department heads, usually at at least a 3x markup. Hilariously, it’s just such a common practice that they even market themselves online. You can call them 24/7 or add them on WeChat for same day service.

Quite brazen, considering it’s illegal, but again, demand so far outstrips supply that if you were a patient, and you didn’t want to wait hours in line, you would rather this service existed than not. Even after hospitals began using telephone and online reservation systems, it wasn’t always easy to get an appointment, especially if you were looking for a specific specialist, which, as we’ve mentioned many times, are really lacking in China.

Just to give you one anecdotal account of one Beijinger’s search for an appointment, he tried several numbers and apps to no avail, no matter when he dialed in -- he was always too late. He’d be like number 140 in line and there was just no way that specialist would see 140 patients a day.  He finally succeeded after purchasing software on Taobao that automated the online registration service.  

And by automating, we really mean botting or hacking. So, also not legal, but often used by scalpers to get numbers.  And it was nontrivial to install and use, and also, I’d imagine, quite risky too -- what if it was just a virus? Yeah, he could have also paid $65 to a scalper for a number, but that’s not affordable for your average citizen. 

You might be asking now, why didn’t the hospitals do something? Well, they did. As we’ve already mentioned, some put in telephone reservation systems. Others made it so that some patients could overflow to the next day. But imagine you’re the hospital, and you just have so much business you can’t barely keep up --  you’re just going to be too busy to focus on this problem. I mean, is it really a problem? People are still coming to you in droves, aren’t they?

Which makes sense why the internet solutions were not made by hospitals but by independent entities like 挂号网, AKA WeDoctor. But even after almost 5 years in operation, only a bit over 1,000 -- that’s just 5% -- of Chinese hospitals at the time were using the online registration system. Most of the hospitals on its platform, another 5,000 or so, only allowed you to see availability.  And even of the hospitals using the system, depending on the department, as few as 10% of the day’s appointments were even available for registration online.  WeDoctor’s market share at the time as a % of total appointments every day? Well less than 1%.    

And did it really solve patients’ issues? A bit, but not too much. The best hospitals in China were also the busiest, and happened to be in the first-tier cities. These places got far more patients than just from their city. People from all over China were going to see these renowned doctors. So having an online system didn’t really make it easier for them to get an appointment, and in fact might have made it harder, although the process itself was probably less painful. 

OK, you’re probably asking now, what does this have to do with telemedicine? This is just appointment making software, no? And how is this software even that interesting? Well, it is and it isn’t.  A few things came out of this business building process, which by the way, dozens if not hundreds of companies were working on, not just WeDoctor. One was that now they had thousands of hospitals piping information through their platform. And two was that they had information on patients, and most importantly, patient reviews.

You have to remember that when WeDoctor started, it was still relatively early. Sure, there were already other people working on e-health, which we’ll talk about in a bit, but overall the level of digitization in this sector was low, so data was valuable. I mean, WeDoctor actually didn’t even charge anything for its services.  That’s right. No business model. But Tencent and others jumped in and led a $100MM Series C investment in 2015 anyway. By this time, WeDoctor was attempting a few other things, boring things like medical records, and more interesting things like telemedicine.

Well, telemedicine with Chinese characteristics anyway. Remember last episode we explained that rules were changed in 2014 to allow for internet hospitals, or offline hospitals to work with tech solution providers and move some of their common and chronic disease consultations online. Obviously WeDoctor was not going to be left out of this party. They quickly established the Wuzhen 乌镇 internet hospital, yes, with that same city where China holds its big World Internet Conference

While the name is also “internet hospital,” it’s fundamentally different from the Guangzhou internet hospital of the last episode.  That one was started by an actual hospital in Canton province. This one is an entirely new entity. Doctors from all over China can “sign up” to practice in this Wuzhen internet hospital.  In China, doctors can provide care only when they’re working through a licensed institution, i.e. a hospital. Their medical license alone does not give them the ability to practice.

Right, so you have to be attached to a hospital or clinic or whatever, and before establishing this Wuzhen hospital, WeDoctor had no such qualification. But now it did. And it had one more thing. In 2014, China allowed doctors to work at different hospitals  -- with some constraints -- but effectively, now doctors could sign up on WeDoctor and be protected by WeDoctor’s Wuzhen hospital license, and do doctor stuff.  As much as was allowed anyways. Remember, even today, telemedicine is still limited to common and chronic diseases, or consultations with experts for more serious ones. 

But it’s not just this one qualification that allowed WeDoctor to grow. Actually you’ll see later that most of its competitors found their way to a similar solution, so this wasn’t much of a barrier. What WeDoctor already had though, was a direct link to hospitals and doctors because of its registration product, and this gave it both accuracy and credibility.

It also did try other things, like set up teams of doctors to consult cases together instead of directing each patient to one doctor only. The logic was simple -- even after many years of education, Chinese people still didn’t trust the non Tier 3 hospitals, so about half of patients were still crowding into the Tier 3 hospitals, which is like just 10% of total facilities, and this was WeDoctor’s attempt to alleviate some of that pressure. Their logic was, maybe you could not wait for that famous cardiologist to see you but consult a team he heads instead? I’m sure it worked in some part, but if you look at their site today, this is not one of the services they push super heavily, so I imagine it didn’t work as well as they thought. Good try, though.

Today, WeDoctor has 2700 hospitals in 30 provinces and thousands of doctors on its platform. As a patient, you can get a 三甲 or top-tier hospital doctor consultation in three minutes for less than $3. Unlimited texting within 24 hours. You can also sign up for a subscription service just like Ping An Good Doctor’s Private Doctor service.  As of today, WeDoctor has become one of the biggest companies in this space, last valued at $5.5Bn, and it’s been in the news recently for rumors that it’s in the process of picking bankers for a billion-dollar IPO

WeDoctor has been rumored to be going public for a while, you’ll see news as early as 2018, when Ping An Good Doctor went public.  But whatever caused its delay, it certainly hasn’t been hurt by the epidemic. It was so quick to launch services targeting COVID19 that even the Chinese consulate helped promote its services to Chinese speakers abroad. And domestically, some cities rushed to launch internet hospitals using its software, much as Wuzhen had.  One in Tianjin went online practically overnight, and the city’s doctors volunteered their time online for free consultations. 

But until it goes public, it’s really hard to know which parts of its business are actually doing well, or doing the best. What we do know is that it’s positioned itself as an HMO, or health maintenance organization, like Kaiser Permanente here in California. Actually, WeDoctor has said numerous times they want to be Kaiser

HMOs have a network of doctors that agree to provide services at a certain pre-arranged price point, but you need to stay within the network. That already makes it fundamentally different from Ping An Good Doctor, which has its own doctors, and then works with partner hospitals. Kaiser effectively employs its own doctors though, through a contractual arrangement. WeDoctor kind of does, I guess? But I doubt any doctors in China say, I’m a WeDoctor doctor! No, they definitely say that they’re employed at an offline, public hospital, because that’s where the trust is. 

Right, regardless of what your structure or employment arrangement is, at least as of today, the only brand Chinese patients care about is 三甲. Are your doctors from 三甲 hospitals? Good. If not? Nothing else matters. The patients certainly don’t care how their doctors are paid, as long as it’s reasonably priced. So the question becomes, how do you get the most number of 三甲 doctors on your platform? And how do you get them to actively consult for you?

It’s a pretty hard problem. The 三甲 doctors are so overwhelmed by demand that they really don’t need to look for work elsewhere. And once you do get them, you don’t want to direct all your traffic to them anyway, because that is precisely the problem with Chinese healthcare, everyone going to 三甲 hospitals for every single little issue. The big opportunity in technology is precisely in what the government calls the hierarchical medical system, i.e. directing patients to the lowest tier clinic they can be treated, versus everyone to the same top 1% of doctors in the country. 

Sure, eventually we’ll have robot doctors and AI that can take care of simple issues, and we already see a ton of software assistance being used in Chinese healthcare, but the technology is still immature, and furthermore, the patients are not necessarily ready for it. So it’s still a top doctor recruitment and activation issue. And we already know WeDoctor went at it using appointment booking -- what did their competitors do?

Fellow Tencent investment 丁香园 dxy.cn went about it completely differently. The site was founded in 2000, and trust me, if you visit on your laptop, you’ll see that it shows its age. It began as a portal for medical knowledge, and its forums were for doctors only.  No wonder people call it a virtual community or social network for doctors. 

It has many other doctor-specific businesses but it was only in 2015 that it began dxy.com, or 丁香医生, which is a simple telemedicine platform.  However, even though it continues to dominate with respect to the mindshare of healthcare professionals -- it has 2mm doctors registered on its platform, which is about half of the 4.5mm total doctors in China --  only about 15000 of them actively engage in telemedicine consultations, which is less than 1%. 

I mean, 丁香园 isn’t unsuccessful. It’s still a unicorn, and it’s got a really good brand with doctors, and has been expanding into medical education, but what its founder wrote about hoping to connect patients with doctors hasn’t really happened. And judging by the amount of competition, I’m not sure it will ever get there.  

Six years after 丁香园 and 4 years before WeDoctor, a company called 好大夫 Haodaifu was founded. It also had a different approach. Haodaifu also means “Good Doctor” in English but to not confuse it with Ping An, we will just call it by its Chinese name. Anyway, CEO and founder Wang Hang 王航 was previously at anti-virus software company Qihoo360, and his original motivation was to start a Yelp for healthcare. It was 2006 and Dianping, China’s Yelp, had just been founded, and was the darling of Chinese internet. Wang Hang and his cofounders all thought that having honest and detailed personal feedback shared online about one’s medical treatment easily provided more value than writing about food.

When they first started, they had to go to each hospital and manually take down and enter doctors’ information. None of this stuff was online. That’s how early this was.  But soon they discovered that they were running up against the rules. Again, the initial set of rules on telemedicine, first passed in 1999, encouraged online consultations but forbade actual treatment. 

But then what happens when you ask the doctor if you can stop taking your drugs, for example, because you were feeling better. And your doctor said yes. Wasn’t that a form of treatment? Your treatment plan had just changed, after all. By an online doctor! But using what certification? If we haven’t made it clear by now, in China doctors cannot treat you as an individual -- they must be part of a certified institution, like a hospital. When you’re doing stuff through Haodaifu … well Haodaifu isn’t a hospital. 

Which explains why Haodaifu and so many others got their own “internet hospital” license. For Haodaifu, who was based in Beijing, they tried asking the Beijing municipal government first, but weren’t given the time of day.  Luckily, the Yinchuan municipal government came to them asking to partner, and agreed to give them a healthcare license which allowed them to operate as an “internet hospital.”

Last episode, we talked about offline hospitals that partnered with a tech company to build a telemedicine platform, but this is different. This was giving a tech company license to operate as a hospital. An internet hospital, anyway.  And this was pretty radical. But it was allowed to happen because Yinchuan is one of the poorest provincial capitals in China, and usually the poorer regions in China get more leeway when it comes to experimenting with stuff that’s not been disallowed.

If I may explain the government’s thinking here briefly, as far as we know anyway, it’s this: look, these places have remained poor despite our best efforts, so it can’t hurt to let them try some new stuff.  The Tier 1 cities have massive economies and we need to be really careful because the ecosystems are so complicated there, but in the more rural areas which are already smaller and more manageable, as long as it’s contained and people are watching over it, let the experiments happen.  

Two years later, 15 more companies, including 丁香园 Dingxiangyuan, had finagled similar deals with the Yinchuan government. But then the central government stepped in and said that Yinchuan had gone overboard.  Soon, the rules changed to say that the Ministry of Health needed to give its approval before the municipal government could do anything. That and only doctor-to-doctor consultations and chronic disease management could be done online. No first-time diagnoses.

Haodaifu was under a lot of pressure at this time because rumors were flying that their business was done for.  Wang Hang said he didn’t know what to do other than follow the rules but not give up. He was right. The rules would become a bit more lax the next year.  As we’ve explained, there’s a list of common and chronic conditions for which you can get treated online now. For chronic conditions, you do need to see a doctor offline first. But for both of these, you can now get a prescription online. 

As of the end of last year, Haodaifu has served over 58mm patients, catalogued over 600K doctors, 220K of whom have registered on the platform. Nearly 80% are from 三甲 hospitals. Tencent is an investor, as is Silicon Valley crossborder fund DCM and Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi. 

Like all the players we’ve mentioned so far, you can pay to get a consultation with a doctor.  You can have a “graphic and text” based exchange, or shoot off a quick question for a fifth of the price, ranging from $0.50 to $9, the price of two cappuccinos. There’s also an option to call the doctor for a 15-minute consultation, which is typically cheaper than a full consultation. And actually, the expert phone call was Haodaifu’s original claim to fame and what they were known for for a really long time. 

Some of the doctors are also available for hire as your “personal doctor” for a subscription fee. A bunch of doctors seem to charge $30-$100 a month, although there are a handful over $1000 and a few at just $1 per month. Clearly, compared to the “HMO” model of WeDoctor, Haodaifu is really more of a marketplace. It was initially envisioned as a review site, remember, so its founders clearly believed that the best doctors should get rewarded more.

It’s done fine, although not spectacularly. Towards the end of 2019, after almost 14 years in operations, Haodaifu was serving nearly 70K patients a day, three times as many as the “busiest” offline hospital in China, twice as many as the Guangzhou provincial internet hospital we talked about last episode.  And I can’t decide if this is good or bad, but only about 60% of their users use the service more than once a year, which seems low, and only 10,000 or so users have paid for their “family doctor” service that we just talked about. 

And we said that 80% of the doctors were from 三甲 hospitals, right? So if the goal was to push for a hierarchical medical system, how was it going to help if everyone is just relying on talent from the top of the pyramid? What about all the non-specialists and tier 1 and 2 hospital doctors, sure they weren’t PhDs, but you don’t need a PhD for common ailments right? That was the opportunity 春雨医生, Spring Rain Doctor, saw, anyway. Founded in 2011, Chunyu established itself as a “light ailment” from the get go. They recruited doctors from everywhere, including community clinics, not just 三甲 hospitals, and allowed them to set their own price. To get users to trust these less pedigreed doctors, they promoted a Q&A section where doctors could answer questions from patients. A bit like content marketing.

Doctors apparently got paid for answering questions, but it wasn’t a large fee, and besides, if you were working at a 三甲 hospital, you likely don’t have the time.  Which is why out of all the platforms we’ve talked about, Chunyu has the reputation for being the place you go to if you aren’t all that sick. It’s hard to know how Chunyu would have developed if something hadn’t happened to it in 2016, when it had a good amount of momentum behind it, having closed the largest fundraising in the sector from the likes of Temasek and CICC

Yeah for a while Chunyu was the talk of the town because of its founder and CEO 张锐 Zhang Rui, who used to be in charge of Netease News, a really significant portal for Chinese netizens. But then he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2016 at the age of 44. A new CEO stepped in and it’s survived, but we’ll never know if Zhang would have taken the company in a different direction.  

I mean, it doesn’t suck. It claims to have serviced over 200mm visits as of 2019 year-end.  Hard to compare with the other platforms when everyone gives these meaningless cumulative numbers, but at least it seems in the same range as its competitors.  Pricing seems to be a bit lower, which would make sense given that it’s more diversified in its doctor base.

Yeah, most doctors are charging about $4.50 to give you a text and image based answer for your question. Some though, do go for almost 10 times as much, if they’re from a famous hospital.  Like everyone else, they have a WeChat mini program that they promote heavily.  Payment and communications, it all happens inside WeChat.  Super easy.  

And now seems like a really good time to briefly mention what the large Chinese internet companies have done in this space, because they haven’t been idle. You already heard us say that Tencent is invested in WeDoctor, Dingxiangyuan, and Haodaifu, or 3 of the 4 companies we mentioned.  They’ve actually invested in two more, medlinker, a social network for doctors turned disease management system and hospital software, and the similarly B2B software Zhuojian 卓健.  Not really telemedicine, so we didn’t mention them. 

Alibaba invested in and then basically acquired a Hong Kong-listed company, which renamed itself to Alihealth back in 2014.  Alihealth had a run up since the virus outbreak and is a $20Bn company right now.  Its services, including free consultations for patients in Hubei, have been heavily marketed by Alibaba and affiliates like Ant Financial, but its revenues are over 95% from pharmaceutical sales, so, while telemedicine might be a future growth area, it is negligible at present.  

JD has a healthcare unit as well, which is its third unicorn subsidiaryValued at $7Bn, it seems to be basically the same as Ali Health, i.e. mostly e-commerce, with a huge focus on e-pharmacy, and then again, some negligible telemedicine capabilities. In fact, JD’s is so niche the main announcement I could find on it is free COVID19 consultations from 300 doctors marketed towards 60mm overseas Chinese. Well, better than nothing, I guess!

And finally there is Baidu. Baidu established a healthcare department back in 2015, only to dismantle it  completely two years later. But two weeks ago, in the beginning of March, it quietly registered a subsidiary called Baidu Health.  Business scope includes medical devices and equipment, health management and consulting, psychotherapy, and pharmaceutical retail. Last year it also made the news for adding healthcare to its business scope, but claims it was for a special project. This announcement, though, seems like it should be a full-fledged effort. 

So let’s summarize here. The story really is that healthcare tech is a clear market opportunity in China, and while we’ve just focused on telemedicine these two episodes, even within this narrow space, there are a lot of companies, because everyone sees that there is a problem to solve. Not enough doctors, uneven distribution of the good doctors, and over-utilization of the good doctors when an average trained one will do --  the opposite of a hierarchical medical system. 

Last episode, we talked about two attempts at solving this problem -- building your own hospital from scratch by hiring doctors in-house like Ping An, or taking your offline hospital online by partnering with a tech company, like Guangzhou internet hospital. Today, we talked about the opposite -- getting a hospital license for your tech company, like WeDoctor, and building your own HMO.

But not everyone started out that way. People saw different opportunities initially. WeDoctor began as an appointment booking website, because it was so extraordinarily difficult to see a doctor -- to 挂号 -- since demand so far outstripped supply. Dingxiangyuan was a community for doctors only to exchange information and learn, and Haodaifu wanted to build a Yelp for doctors. Only Chunyuyisheng launched with anything remotely close to telemedicine as a first product.

Eventually all of them found themselves doing some telemedicine though. Dingxiangyuan probably has the least volume, but the others, operating within the constraints of telemedicine in China, which is only open for common and chronic illnesses and second opinions, are seeing OK volume, maybe low single-digit multiples of what a busy hospital in China is doing. Certainly not magnitudes higher.

The expectation though, is that they will. Or I think they will, because they have pretty high valuations.  The hope is that COVID-19 gave the sector a permanent and huge boost. But is that really true? Or are people being maybe a bit too optimistic?

Depending on which consultancy’s numbers you use, last year’s penetration rate of telemedicine was just a bit over 6%, and even with the “tailwind” of COVID19, people are projecting about 8% this year, or just 50mm users. Of course, this could change as the situation updates, but so far, no one is thinking all of a sudden half China is going to make virtual visits. It’s probably still going to be a small portion of people. 

We could be wrong. I hope we’re wrong. But realistically, none of the companies we’ve talked about have solved the truly big issues. More doctors, better doctors, and a hierarchical medical system. I suppose WeDoctor is trying with their teams solution and Chunyuyisheng by onboarding lower-tier hospitals’ doctors, but the scale at which this needs to happen to make a big difference? Not yet happening.

And don’t forget these businesses are facing competition from offline hospitals themselves going online. With ever more favorable government policies, the number of those more than doubled in 2019, to a total of 269. Other than just a bigger selection, what exactly is the advantage a telemedicine startup has over a trusted hospital whose doctors can see you online?

None, really, beyond selection. The “medical technology” component of these companies is honestly quite weak. Going online is more convenient, but it’s resulting in at best an equal treatment, not a better one. And a lot of the time it can be worse. In a survey of Chinese mothers who’ve used telemedicine, almost 60% thought that the efficiency of communicating online was low -- it was difficult to articulate the child’s symptoms, it would be much easier in person to just show the doctor. 

Yeah, it seems that the products need to be better for adoption to really increase. It’s still primarily used for really simple, maybe even inane things. Case in point, 丁香园 said that during the epidemic, just two questions made up over half of their telemedicine appointments: “which symptoms indicate COVID19, and how to wear a mask properly.”

Wasting a doctor’s time to learn how to wear a mask … not a great use of technology. But even though it was convenient and for the most part free to talk to doctors during this trying time, DAUs for the category, according to Analysys, was up just 30% from last year, for an increase of 1.6mm users.  Given how serious the epidemic was and how paranoid people were about going to the hospital, I really thought this number would be bigger, like a lot bigger.  

On the other hand, maybe this is good news. Even in the thick of it, it seems that a good portion of the population managed to stay healthy.  But then this explains why a lot of people don’t think the demand will continue post COVID19.  Like we said, the technology simply isn’t there, chatting with a doctor via text or video isn’t some breakthrough. And for many people, this is a low-frequency use case where convenience isn’t the top consideration.

What do you think? Telemedicine will definitely grow in China, but will the epidemic accelerate the industry as much as people hope? Like, is it going to quadruple this year? Or even double? We think that would be hard, because none of the solutions currently really address the underlying problems in China’s healthcare system. But we want to know what you think! Write us and let us know your thoughts!

OK, that’s all for this week folks! Thanks for listening nd don’t forget to write us that review. Have any questions? Email us! We really enjoyed putting this together, and we are always open to any comments or suggestions. You can find us on twitter at thepandaily, at techbuzzchina, and my personal Twitter account is RUIMA.

And my Twitter is spelled GINYGINY. Tech Buzz China by Pandaily is powered by the Sinica Podcast Network on SupChina. Pandaily.com is an English language site that tells you “everything about China’s innovation.” Our producers are Caiwei Chen and Kaiser Kuo. Thank you for listening!

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Ep. 63: China Telemedicine in the Time of COVID-19: Part 1