Doctor consultation app seeks to disrupt China's health care market
In a market expected to exceed US$1 trillion by 2020, tech start-up helps users tackle mild ailments and provides extra income for doctors
Expensive, slow - and increasingly violent - the mainland's health care system is in crisis. Can Silicon Valley-style innovation save it?
By 2020, health care spending in China is expected to exceed US$1 trillion, according to a report from McKinsey, and analysts estimate it will become the second-largest market for pharmaceuticals in the world next year.
Despite a significant increase in government health expenditure in recent years, the amount as a share of gross domestic product has declined to about 5 per cent, much lower than the world average of 10 per cent.
Doctors are overworked and underpaid, and corruption is rife. In May, British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline was accused of "massive and systematic" bribery to drum up sales.
Bribery is often cited as a factor to the other great ill of Chinese health care: violence. A survey by the China Hospital Management Association found that between 2002 and 2012, violence against medical personnel rose on average 23 per cent every year.
Doctor consultation mobile application Chunyu Yisheng offers a potential way forward, driving innovation from the bottom up, rather than depending on government reforms. The app - which this month raised US$50 million in series C funding, the biggest single funding round into a Chinese health-care start-up to date, according to website Tech in Asia - connects users with physicians remotely to discuss and diagnose their ailments.
"We find some health problems are better solved online," Chunyu chief technology officer Zeng Boyi told the South China Morning Post. "Those problems, mainly mild problems, were not easily solved before. People either [self-diagnose] online, risking wrong and unpersonalised information, or go to the hospital directly, which results in a very high time cost."