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I believe that many people have seen the advertisement of Meituan buying medicine in the elevator recently. The spokesperson of Meituan before buying medicine was Deng Chao, but this time it was replaced by Sun Li, and even the slogan has changed, from "buying medicine on Meituan" to "seeing a doctor and buying medicine 24 hours a day". There seems to be only two words between "buy medicine" and "see a doctor and buy medicine", but what is actually revealed behind it is the adjustment of the strategic direction of Meituan's pharmaceutical business.
Open the Meituan or Meituan Waimai App, enter the homepage of Meituan Buying Drugs, and click "Ask Doctor" to enter the consultation interface. According to the needs of users, you can choose "Online Consultation" or "Video Call". In response, experts provide services such as consultation, follow-up visits for chronic diseases, and interpretation of physical examination reports online. In the past, Meituan mainly focused on the purchase and distribution of medicines, but this time it has expanded to the online consultation side.
"Buying medicine + online consultation" is standard
In fact, Meituan Yaoyao launched an online consultation service as early as June 2022, but there has been no splash. Before Meituan, JD Health launched the online consultation platform "JD Family Medicine" on August 18, 2020, and Ali Health connected to Sina's "Ask Doctor" resource as early as 2015 to provide online consultation for doctors Serve. It can be said that "buying medicine + online consultation" is already a standard configuration for major manufacturers to deploy their pharmaceutical business.
First, users need a doctor's guidance before and after buying medicine, and online consultation can quickly meet this need of users. Some patients learned most of the basic nursing knowledge and medical health problems during the face-to-face consultation in the hospital, but they lacked concrete concepts when faced with the details of daily life, such as whether sugar-free drinks can be drunk by diabetics, and whether cherries can be used. Is it dangerous to eat or eat sugar substitutes? It can be seen that online consultation is an important supplement to the drug buying service.
Second, improving the service of seeing a doctor and buying medicine is an important part of Dachang's enrichment of local life. Ali, Meituan, and JD.com have been deeply involved in local life services, and online consultation is an essential part of them. Online medical consultation can be said to be the entrance to Internet medical care, and drug distribution is the key realization link. Therefore, the combination of drug purchase and online consultation can make JD.com and Meituan the right-hand man for healthy family life.
Third, the launch of online consultation services can empower offline pharmacies. At present, pharmacists in offline pharmacies mainly play the role of simple dispensing and cashiers. Naturally, their level cannot be compared with that of doctors in tertiary hospitals. Online consultation can solve this problem. Users can consult high-level doctors on the online consultation platform, and can also enjoy the instant delivery service brought by offline pharmacies and platform purchases, which can also supplement the service capabilities of pharmacies from the side.
fight professionalism
From the perspective of business models, whether it is the earlier Ali Health and JD Health, or the current Meituan Buying Medicines, most of them have a certain similarity, that is, they all emphasize "medicine + medicine". Jin Enlin, CEO of JD Health, also said at the "Third JD Health Partner Conference-Annual Doctor Ceremony" held in February this year that the core of Internet medical and health development is doctors. Therefore, doctors with high professional level are one of the key points for the platform to develop Internet medical services.
On the one hand, the platform empowers doctors in all aspects. When users go to see a doctor online, the most worrying question is how good the doctors are and whether they are reliable. Taking JD Health as an example, in 2022, JD Health will launch more than 200 courses on laws and regulations, platform specifications, service capabilities, personal branding, etc., to help doctors quickly master online practice norms. In addition, JD Health continues to accumulate medical content and digital cases on the platform to help doctors improve their professional capabilities. Among them, the medical training center is connected to the national distance continuing medical education courses, and has introduced more than 70 CME (continuing medical education) projects, covering multiple disciplines such as clinical, internal and external women and children. It can be seen that JD Health attaches great importance to the training of platform doctors.
AliHealth, on the other hand, started with the ability and talent training of doctors in county-level hospitals, and established a grass-roots doctor training platform called "Medical Butterfly Valley Together", which provides free knowledge content acquisition and skill training for grass-roots doctors in underdeveloped counties, and improves grass-roots doctors' understanding of common diseases and multiple diseases. Standardized diagnosis and treatment of morbidity, awareness of early screening methods for serious illnesses, and capacity building for emergency and severe illness treatment. According to the 2022 fiscal year report, as of March 31, 2022, nearly 160,000 licensed physicians, licensed pharmacists and nutritionists have signed contracts with Ali Health to provide online health consultation services.
In addition, Meituan, a latecomer, has also cooperated with 1,500 public hospitals, of which more than 70% are tertiary hospitals, and more than 70% of doctors in online tertiary hospitals are called attending physicians. In the past year, Meituan has provided online consultation and health consultation services for 20 million users.
On the other hand, the platform continues to promote the construction of medical digital intelligence, so as to improve the work efficiency of doctors. At present, the application of artificial intelligence in the medical field has been very extensive, including the application in the initial screening, analysis, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. To this end, JD.com focused on creating a '1+4+5' medical digital intelligence engine, which includes 4 technology platforms: an online cloud consultation room for doctors, an intelligent auxiliary diagnosis platform, a patient management platform, a RWD scientific research platform, and a digital therapy platform , as well as five core technical capabilities of medical knowledge system, auxiliary diagnosis and treatment, specialist diagnosis, doctor-patient multimodal interaction, and medical big data.
In addition, the JD Health RWD platform can integrate data inside and outside the hospital, combined with patients' electronic medical records, scientific research follow-up records, home equipment and other data in JD Health Internet Hospital to form a complete real-world data chain, providing doctors with comprehensive scientific research and clinical decision-making Support, improve data management efficiency, and reduce scientific research costs.
Ali Health, on the other hand, invested in "cloud infrastructure" to create a "cloud medical community" to realize the integrated management of medical resources in counties, townships, and villages. In this process, the AliHealth platform is responsible for the connection between doctors and patients and the effect of improving the efficiency of medical resources: doctors in first- and second-tier cities such as tertiary hospitals and other hospitals start "cloud consultation", and provide follow-up consultation services through Internet hospitals, remote areas of patients with chronic diseases can solve the "last mile" of chronic disease management without going out.
fight immediacy
According to the "Research Report on the Pharmaceutical E-Commerce Industry of Internet Medical Care in 2022" released by the Future Think Tank, in the market segment of Internet medical care, JD Health and Ali Health occupy the vast majority of the market share. Drug price difference), platforms (3P business, earning commissions, platform usage fees, etc.) to expand revenue, it can be seen that JD Health and Ali Health have obvious advantages, but they also have some problems.
Specifically, when buying medicines on Ali Health or JD Health platforms, it needs to be delivered the next day or a few days, and some can achieve same-day delivery, but due to the pressure of transportation capacity, only a few can guarantee delivery within 30 minutes. This has led to users who buy medicines on JD.com and Ali platforms with relatively no time-sensitive needs. They usually buy health care products, nutritional foods and other health consumer products, but as long as they are sick, they will still choose pharmacies with higher immediacy. Or Meituan buys medicine.
First, relying on offline pharmacies with a wide coverage, Meituan can deliver medicines to your door within 30 minutes. Under the new trend of instant retail, pharmaceuticals, as a category that closely matches the instant retail model, will also usher in new growth in this new channel. According to Nielsen data, 59% of O2O users who buy medicines represent an increase in the industry. Meituan has been buying medicines in the form of O2O, covering 2,800 cities, counties, districts and towns across the country, providing more than 75,000 kinds of medicines, and connecting more than 200,000 pharmacies across the country.
In addition, in order to solve the difficulty of taking medication late at night and improve human efficiency, Meituan Yaoyao launched a "little yellow light" plan to protect people's livelihood and support 24-hour pharmacies in 2021. According to statistics, the number of "Little Yellow Light" 24-hour pharmacies has increased from 2,000 to 10,000, and the production capacity of a single store is 8 times higher than that of non-24-hour pharmacies. In the first year of its launch, 40 million people who had encountered difficulties in buying medicines at night were brought in. Bought medicine late at night.
Secondly, Meituan also launched the next-day delivery by express delivery and 1-5 day delivery by express delivery to meet the needs of urban residents who have not been covered by instant drug delivery services. Next-day delivery and express delivery within 1-5 days are essentially a service model that is highly homogeneous with B2C platform mail delivery. Since most of the delivery of common medicines does not have special requirements, this B2C delivery model of express delivery is different from that of the United States. Buying medicine in groups is more suitable.
This time, Meituan has expanded its online consultation to open up the entire process of consultation + drug delivery. Starting from the actual needs of users for online medical treatment and purchase of medicines, with the help of professional consultation, pharmacy resources with a wide coverage, and 30-minute real-time The delivery team is both professional and immediacy, and jointly builds the minds of users to buy medicines in Meituan.
summary
On the whole, in the Internet medical market, the status of the large-scale Ali Health and JD Health is obviously unshakable, but Meituan Yaoyao can capture users by virtue of the unparalleled drug delivery speed of other platforms, and thus rises rapidly. Therefore, some users may see a doctor in Ali Health or JD Health, and then jump to Meituan Waimai to buy medicines. After all, "online consultation" pays attention to professionalism, and "buying medicine" focuses on speed.
Since Internet medical care entered the start-up period in 2014, it has been reshuffled several times. According to the statistical survey data on the development of China's Internet network, as of June 2022, my country's online Internet medical care has been a red sea in the past few years. How do giants release new technologies? Value is the key to success. In the long run, all the imagination space of Internet medical care in the future needs to be continuously explored and implemented in practice.