After the early influx of hot money and horse racing, Internet medical is entering a new stage of competition. On November 2, Zou Lei said at the 2017 China Telecom Wing Health Ecological Cooperation Conference that the market size of China's Internet medical industry last year has reached 22.3 billion yuan, an increase of 43%, and the industry has entered the stage of stable development from rapid development.

Zou Lei said that at present, the Internet medical industry chain has gradually taken shape, online registration and consultation companies have entered the competition stage of medical resource expansion from traffic competition, and the market growth rate is expected to remain at about 40%.

Internet medical treatment has entered a stable development

From the first year of medical e-commerce in 2013 to the blowout of Internet hospitals in 2016, over the past few years, Internet technology is gradually changing the traditional way of medical treatment and medical institutions.

Data show that from 2009 to 2016, the size of China's Internet medical market surged from 200 million yuan to 22.3 billion yuan, and maintained a rapid expansion of more than 120% from 2011 to 2014. However, in the past two years, the growth rate of the industry has slowed down, falling to about 40%. Zou Lei said that the industry is expected to enter a stage of stable development next.

"From the initial registration, the Internet has gradually penetrated into the core link of diagnosis and treatment, and a series of Internet medical services such as online registration, online consultation, online diagnosis and treatment, online payment, medical e-commerce and post-diagnosis services have also emerged." Zou Lei pointed out that the application of the Internet in the medical field has first reconstructed the medical treatment process, and gradually moved the hospital's registration, consultation and payment links out of the hospital, and also extended the medical treatment process forward and backward.

As a hospital administrator, Geng Qingshan, secretary of the Party Committee of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, deeply felt the change of Internet technology to the traditional medical treatment mode. He believes that medical e-commerce, registration and other convenient services, has not touched the core of life science, the future of Internet medical is a combination of big data and artificial intelligence technology.

"Five years ago, there was an expert in Silicon Valley who said that the first person to disappear in the hospital was an imaging doctor, and I listened unconvinced and felt that it was impossible. In the past two years, not only I think it is possible, but even the imaging doctor told me that if I don't work hard, it may be replaced by AI (artificial intelligence) and big data." For example, Geng Qingshan said that in the past, the naked eye could not see whether the tumor had metastasized, but there was a team of doctors in his hospital who used big data to realize precision medicine and imaging omics before the tumor had become large, combining big data to predict that the patient would have metastasis. In other words, with the help of these advanced technologies, not only save time for medical treatment, but also be more accurate and scientific.

From traffic competition to medical resource expansion

Since the second half of last year, many mobile medical entrepreneurs have suddenly felt the decline of the industry, especially after the news of layoffs from well-known platforms such as the medical consultation network and medical 160, the Internet medical industry is full of grief.

"After a period of exploration, we found that whether it is to make registration, online consultation, it is difficult to cash in traffic." Especially to do medical e-commerce, while trying to cultivate the online purchasing behavior of young users through prices, on the other side, they are constantly burning money on drainage, and few make money." An entrepreneur who participated in the construction of an early medical e-commerce platform told reporters that many platforms began to reflect after realizing these problems, hoping to break through the hospital walls to get more hospital resources.

In fact, Wang Hang, founder of Haodafu Online, has also expressed a similar view. He said that for mobile health care, simply engaging in light consultation is still too thin, light consultation can only tell users where the right doctor is, and can not actually provide medical services for them. At this rate, mobile health may not be dead, but it will not be much better.

Around the same time, multiple platforms with user traffic began to transform or extend offline. The reporter combing found that the registration network transformed to an Internet hospital and renamed micro medical Group, Spring rain doctor built offline hospitals, and seven Lekang participated in the construction of Internet hospitals.

Data show that in August 2017, the number of independent devices in the online registration and consultation industry APP was basically stable at 11 million units, down 22.1% compared with January, and the proportion of effective browsing time on the APP side is also shrinking, basically the same as the PC side. The above shows that mobile registration and online consultation companies have shifted their attention from traffic competition to the expansion of medical resources.

Zou Lei finally pointed out that the essential resource of the medical industry is doctors, and the ability of enterprises to establish in-depth cooperation with medical institutions and doctor groups determines whether enterprises can access high-quality data and provide high-quality medical services to patients. In the future, only enterprises with high-quality medical resources can open up the commercial value chain.