Beijing’s popular doctor appointment platform Jingyitong goes dark despite finding favour with patients amid pandemic

A popular platform that allowed Beijing residents to make doctor appointments, pay bills and access physical check-up reports online turned dark at the end of April, in a costly lesson for Chinese technology entrepreneurs.

The Jingyitong system, which began service in 2015 within super-app WeChat, provided convenience to residents in the nation’s capital city during the pandemic, but its public-service function struggled to secure revenue from public hospitals or the healthcare authority, leading to its eventual demise.

The case illustrates the uneasy relationship between the state, the public sector and the private sector, namely the municipal healthcare authority, the financier Bank of Beijing and the privately-owned system developer, Beijing Yihe Spring Technology.

Beijing Yihe Spring said in a notice last year that the Bank of Beijing “refused to fulfil its obligations to inject capital, resulting in the company bearing alone the project expanses of hundreds of millions of yuan for the past seven years”, making it impossible to sustain operations.

The incident occurred in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many residents were reliant on the online system to book PCR tests and obtain the results without going out. Beijing’s healthcare authority promised then that the service would not be terminated and that it was working with the developer and the funds-provider to resolve the dispute. Those efforts appear to have failed.

Neither Beijing Yihe Spring or the Bank of Beijing immediately responded to a request for comment by the Post on Friday. The Beijing Hospital Authority, which the Beijing Municipal Health Commission suggested as a point of contact for the issue, could not be reached.