Medical version of Uber putting patients in touch with doctors
Print Edition
TRYING to see a doctor in China’s public hospitals can be a painful experience, often involving queueing overnight to get a consultation lasting just a few minutes.
Now, an Internet firm is attempting to address the problem by providing patients online access to licensed doctors in more than 2,400 hospitals across the country.
Wuzhen Internet Hospital, based in Wuzhen in east China’s Zhejiang Province, was founded in December 2015 to provide services via an app it has developed called We Doctor.
Zhang Guimin, marketing director of the company, described the firm as the medical version of Uber, where patients can describe their illness and arrange appropriate doctors.
“Doctors can pick up orders on their own and confirm an appointment for an online diagnosis when they have time,” Zhang said.
It’s the online equivalent of an outpatient service. Users can get prescriptions and pay bills on their phones, and have their medicine delivered.
They can also make face-to-face appointments with doctors through the app.
“It is better to see a patient in person in the case of a serious illness,” said Chen Aiguo, head of the surgical department at Tongxiang No. 3 People’s Hospital in Zhejiang, “The app is very helpful for making appointments and conducting further consultations. You can just do it with your phone.”
Chen is among 260,000 doctors registered on the We Doctor app, which sees an average of 31,000 appointments made each day.
“The app helps connect well-known doctors with patients from not only major cities but also rural areas,” Zhang said. “It helps balance unevenly distributed medical resources.”
Home to the world’s largest online community, 710 million people as of June 2016, more than 95 percent of China’s cities, towns and villages now have broadband.
Wuzhen Internet Hospital set up a branch in southwest China’s Sichuan Province last month to facilitate remote diagnosis services in the poverty-stricken Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture.
Qiu Jipo, 47, was among the first to use the service. Suffering from femoral head necrosis and arthritis, Qiu has a five-hour walk to the nearest clinic that can treat him.
Through a remote video system set up by We Doctor’s Sichuan branch, Han Sijing, a doctor from 416 Hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, was able to diagnose Qiu, and supervise a local specialist in the township’s clinic to treat him.
“Seeing a doctor outside the town or a doctor from a top-level hospital had been unthinkable before,” Qiu said.
The Internet hospital also has branches in 16 cities and provinces, including Beijing, northwest China’s Gansu Province and southwest China’s Guizhou Province.
It plans to set up 100 branches over the next three years, providing online consultations and e-prescriptions via cellphones or remote video systems.
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