"Platform" is a strategy that Tencent has adhered to for a long time, and this is also true in the medical field. Whether it is investing money or building its own products, Tencent hopes to connect to the industry through its own platform.

From an investment perspective, as of now, Tencent has invested in 35 companies in the medical field, with a total investment of more than 20 billion yuan. According to the statistics of Health Point, among the 35 projects currently invested by Tencent, 24 are domestic projects and 11 are overseas projects (9 of which are US projects and 2 are Indian projects). Moreover, among these invested projects, many projects are continuously invested by Tencent, such as the Medical Federation, WeDoctor Group, and Doctor Penguin.

List of medical and health projects that Tencent has invested in China

List of medical and health projects that Tencent has invested in overseas

In this regard, a person from Tencent Medical told the Health Point reporter that the medical business is a module that Tencent puts at the strategic height of the group. The company places more emphasis on the long-term core value of this business, so the support provided is also comprehensive and long-term.

After experiencing the investment peak in 2015, the number of Tencent's investment projects has decreased in the past two years, and its focus has shifted from investment to self-construction. Its early self-built products, Sugar Doctor and Doctor Teng Ai, have been in the field of chronic diseases for a long time. Tencent Miying, Medical Wisdom Cloud, and Penguin Medical Classic, which were newly established in 2017, are also gradually developing and improving. At present, Tencent's territory in the medical and health industry is becoming clearer.

Changes in the number and amount of Tencent's investment projects in the medical field from 2014 to 2017 (organized by health points)

In addition to capital investment, self-built projects also need to make a lot of investment in resources, manpower, and material resources. Compared with investment in startup projects that require greater capital, how does Tencent Healthcare choose self-built products?

Judging from the self-built projects that Tencent has disclosed, on the one hand, if Tencent wants to form a complete medical Internet ecosystem, it needs to build an open platform. In addition to the products in each link, this platform also needs to integrate security and cloud protection. Compared with investment projects, these related products are obviously more suitable for Tencent to fill in many functions such as storage, mobile payment, and AI. On the other hand, Tencent’s self-built smart blood glucose meters, AI imaging, and medical information platforms all have good development prospects, and they are also very popular entrepreneurial fields. If these products can be integrated into Tencent’s Internet ecosystem, they may not It will be a "lost business".

For Tencent, the advantages of its self-built products lie in three aspects. One is that it has a large number of users, the other is the ability to perform user operation and maintenance, and the third is that it has strong support in Internet technology. At the same time, Tencent’s self-built products also have certain difficulties, such as: how to make products more in line with the characteristics of the medical industry, how to find accurate positioning of products in the market, and how to leverage and match resource support in the huge Tencent system, etc. .

Tencent Medical's layout ecology (partial)

It is worth noting that, at present, Tencent has connected the three major medical entities of patients, doctors, and medical institutions through investment and self-construction. After sorting out Tencent-related medical and health projects from the health point, it is not difficult to find that Tencent has already deployed artificial intelligence, medical information, chronic disease management, doctor community, big data , physical clinics, medical beauty, genetic testing, insurance, etc. More than ten medical and health subdivision fields.

Specifically, Tencent first hopes to use its social platform advantages to break the communication barriers between patients, medical institutions, and doctors. Secondly, Tencent hopes to open up the health, human resources, and medical insurance systems, and realize the integration of the social insurance and medical insurance system, the hospital information system, and the Tencent mobile service system to build its own business advantages. In addition, Tencent also has a comprehensive layout in the field of medical technology, such as genetic testing, medical Internet of things, and artificial intelligence for health. These are also important tools for Tencent to deploy the medical industry.

In fact, each of the three major Internet giants BAT claims to build their own open platform, hoping to "connect" through the platform, and they have also laid out related businesses. However, this process is not very smooth, especially for self-built products. For example, in April 2017, Baidu Doctor had no choice but to shut down. In another example, Ali also faced the dilemma that the drug regulatory code was suspended when deploying the medical and health industry. BAT, which has been successful in many fields, faces a complex ecological medical industry, without exception, feels that the road ahead is difficult.

Deploy smart medical care with the power of AI  

Previously, Chen Guangyu, vice president of Tencent Group's mobile Internet business group, mentioned in an interview with the media that Tencent's overall medical product positioning is still connected. Because of this, Tencent's AI medical products are mainly developed in two directions: "doctor's medical service" and "patient's medical service".

On November 15, 2017, Tencent Miying entered the list of the first batch of national new-generation artificial intelligence open innovation platforms and was responsible for building a new-generation national artificial intelligence open innovation platform for medical imaging. This time Tencent Miying's entry into the "national team" has added an important bargaining chip to its accelerated deployment of the "Internet + smart medical" ecosystem. According to public information, since the official release of Tencent Miying, it has been deployed in nearly 100 hospitals in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Gansu, Sichuan and other provinces and cities.

In fact, Tencent’s "Internet + Smart Medical" services include not only AI-assisted diagnosis and treatment represented by Tencent Miying, but also the whole process of WeChat medical treatment, WeChat medical insurance payment, commercial insurance, WeChat online medical consultation, WeChat electronic prescription, WeChat Follow-up services, structuring of medical records, medical big data, etc.

In addition, Tencent will also conduct more in-depth research on AI and big data, and will also explore in intelligent follow-up, intelligent science popularization and other aspects and apply it in medical scenarios. The latest development is new applications based on AI and big data. "Tencent Ruizhi" took the lead in the field of intelligent triage.