Ping An Health Product Analysis

At present, there are more than 3,000 certified mobile medical apps in my country, but their functions are similar. Their main functions are concentrated on medical and health auxiliary service functions such as appointment registration, medical consultation, medical services, literature information, etc.

Since the official release of Ping An Health APP client in 2015, in just 6 years, the "Ping An Health" APP has accumulated 346 million registered users and over 67 million monthly active users, making it the mobile medical application with the highest coverage in China.

How did Ping An Health establish its own advantages and break through the fierce competition from many competitors? This article will analyze Ping An Health’s perspective to give you an in-depth understanding of the company, identify its optimizations and deficiencies, and provide optimization suggestions.

This article will analyze from the following aspects:

• Industry Analysis
• Competitive product analysis
• User Value Analysis
• Business value analysis
• Product Iteration Analysis
• Product structure analysis
• Operational Analysis
• Analysis Summary
• Future Outlook/Optimization Suggestions

1. Industry Analysis

Before 2019, the size of the Internet medical market was in a state of ups and downs and overall growth, but it showed a blowout growth in 2020. What is the growth logic behind this phenomenon?

Next, we will analyze step by step from the macro perspective using the PEST model.

Data source: BiDa Consulting

1. Politics

In December 2019, the National Healthcare Security Administration issued the "Guiding Opinions on Improving the "Internet +" Medical Service Price and Medical Insurance Payment Policy", which detailed the "Internet +" medical service price and medical insurance payment policy.

On April 7, 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the "Implementation Plan on Policies to Promote the 'Cloud Computing, Data Use and Intelligence' Action to Cultivate New Economic Development", which mentioned for the first time at the national level that Internet medical care can be used as the first diagnosis and included in medical insurance.

In July 2020, the General Office of the State Council issued the "Implementation Opinions on Further Optimizing the Business Environment and Better Serving Market Players", which included qualified Internet medical services in the scope of medical insurance reimbursement.

The biggest problem restricting the development of Internet medical care in the past was the coordination of medical insurance. If Internet medical care is not included in medical insurance, it will be difficult to support the development of the industry relying solely on people’s own funds or China’s commercial medical insurance. With the introduction of national policies in 2020 to open up key links in medical insurance payment, this problem will soon be solved, which will greatly promote the development of Internet medical care.

2. Economy

In 2019, the per capita healthcare consumption expenditure of Chinese residents was 1,902 yuan, with a growth rate of 12%.

With the steady growth of the domestic economy and the continuous improvement of residents' consumption level, residents' demand for medical consumption has also increased accordingly.

With the development of the "stay-at-home economy", people are accustomed to online consumption, rely on online consultations for medical treatment, and buy medicines online, which has promoted the rapid development of Internet medical care.

3. Society & Culture

China has already become an aging society, and the demand for medical services has also increased due to aging.

At the same time, under the influence of various factors such as mental stress and environmental pollution, the number of sub-healthy people and younger people suffering from chronic diseases is gradually increasing, further increasing the demand.

Chronic diseases have the characteristics of "long duration, large service demand, high medical costs, and large number of people". Chronic disease patients need a reasonable chronic disease management model to help them complete treatment plans and strengthen self-management. However, such long-term monitoring and management are not suitable to be provided by centralized hospitals. Internet medical care has brought new possibilities for the management of chronic diseases.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, residents' demand for online medical services continued to grow, and provinces and cities successively issued policies to include "Internet +" medical service pilot projects into medical insurance payments.

Data source: iResearch

4. Technology

With the rapid development of the Internet and the emergence of technological innovations such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence, the Internet and mobile medical care provide a convenient and safe way to use medical services.

The development of the Internet of Things and 5G technologies has promoted the rise and development of online medical consultations. Internet technology empowers medical services, not only forming a nationwide unified and efficient medical insurance information system in terms of online consultation and online settlement, but also bringing benefits to Internet medical information technology service providers.

With the continuous growth of market demand and the support of many policies, the Internet medical industry has grown rapidly, the service content of Internet medical services has continued to expand, the business scope has continued to expand, the medical resource chain has gradually been opened up, and a relatively complete Internet medical industry chain has been formed.

So what will be the development trend of this industry in the next few years? Is there enough market space?

On the one hand, the emergence of the epidemic has caused a "traffic blowout" in the mobile medical market, and online consultations have become the main way for patients to obtain medical services during the epidemic prevention period. In 2020, the country officially included Internet medical services in medical insurance, which accelerated the rapid outbreak of the Internet medical market; as users gradually develop the habit of obtaining medical services on mobile devices, the market size of Internet medical care and pharmaceutical e-commerce will continue to grow in the future.

China's Internet medical market size and forecast:

Data source: iResearch

At the same time, according to iResearch user surveys, the vast majority of users have a positive attitude towards current Internet + medical products, and almost all users are willing to try to purchase Internet + medical products in the future.

Data source: iResearch

This is because, as people's living standards continue to improve, the number of elderly people continues to rise, and chronic diseases become more and more numerous, the health care industry will have huge social and market demands in the future.

The size of China's health management service market was 233.64 billion yuan in 2019 and reached 320.08 billion yuan in 2020. Among the user demand distribution in China's health management field in 2020, user demand for fitness and fat loss accounted for the highest proportion at 70%, rehabilitation nursing accounted for 60%, and diet and health accounted for 65.4%. Users pay more attention to health management, and health management will become a trend in the future.

Data source: BiDa Consulting

This shows that there is still a lot of room for the Internet medical market, and the penetration rate will continue to rise rapidly in the next few years.

2. Competitive Product Analysis

The service content of my country's Internet medical care has gradually developed from registration and consultation to a more diversified direction, and online medical care has become a hot track for competition among medical companies. The epidemic has accelerated the widespread application of mobile medical services and greatly improved the efficiency of residents' medical treatment.

Monitoring data show that in March, the monthly active users of major online medical apps showed a pattern of one super-strong app and many strong apps. Ping An Health’s monthly active users reached 11.874 million, with WeDoctor and Good Doctor Online ranking second and third.

Data source: BiDa Consulting

According to iResearch user survey, the main demand of Internet + medical users is occasional minor illnesses, such as colds and coughs, followed by chronic disease management.

The online medical model of online consultation and offline medication is more suitable for the treatment of minor illnesses and chronic diseases, so the main behavior of users is concentrated on online consultation services.

Data source: iResearch

The research object of this product analysis report is Ping An Health APP, whose core business is online medical consultation. Therefore, this report will select APPs with online consultation as the core function.

Combining the monthly active usage ranking of online medical apps released by Bidachun Consulting in March 2021 and the iResearch Qianfan Index Medical - Online Consultation App Ranking in the same period, the apps with high volume ranking and online consultation as their core function are Ping An Health and WeDoctor.

1. User Data

As shown in the table below, the performance data of different indicators of Ping An Health and WeDoctor in June 2019 are summarized (from Analysys International). Next, the two will be analyzed from three aspects: user scale, user retention rate, and user activity.

User scale is the foundation of a product development. Judging from the two indicators of active users and industry exclusivity, Ping An Health has obvious advantages in scale and its industry share is second to none.

Ping An Health's advantages in user retention rate and user activity are obviously not as prominent as its advantages in user scale. Compared with the 6-7 times gap in user scale, its user retention rate is about 1.5 times that of WeDoctor, and its user activity is about 1.7 times.

Since its establishment in April 2015, Ping An Health’s positioning has been very clear, which is to become Ping An Group’s largest online traffic portal. The traffic platform is both Ping An Good Doctor's strategic direction and its underlying business logic. When the user scale is large enough, how to retain users and how to increase user activity are also the key to Internet medical companies achieving a closed business loop.

WeDoctor excels at offline medical resource operations, while Ping An Good Doctor excels at online user-end operations.

In addition to a wide range of products, hot live broadcasts and other features, Ping An Health's marketing activities such as step-by-step gold winning, lightning drug purchase, and health headlines clearly allow users to feel the platform's promotional strength. It was not until 2017 that WeDoctor increased its e-commerce operations, continuously expanded its product categories, and continued to carry out user-end promotions, which was several steps slower than Ping An Good Doctor. WeDoctor spends most of its energy on integrating doctor resources, hospitals and pharmacy resources.

As of December 31, 2020, Ping An Good Doctor had 373 million registered users, and WeDoctor had 222 million registered users. Overall, Ping An Health’s user data indicators in all aspects are better than WeDoctor’s.

2. Business Model

1) Safe and healthy

① Financing history

Ping An Good Doctor was founded in 2014 and was renamed "Ping An Health" on January 27, 2021.

② Business module

Online medical care, consumer medical care, health mall, health management and interaction.

Among them, online medical care is Ping An Health’s core business. Online medical services mainly include online consultation, appointment registration, health 360 membership services, private doctor services (including online 7×24 hours consultation, personal health management plan, child development and growth plan, referral registration, hospitalization arrangements and expert secondary diagnosis and treatment reports and other offline services).

Consumer healthcare refers to providing users with services such as medical beauty, physical examinations, dental health, and genetic testing.

The health mall provides users with a variety of health-related products, including Chinese and Western medicines, nutritional supplements, health foods, personal care, beauty and skin care, sports and fitness, medical devices, maternal and child care, etc.

The health management and interactive services customize health plans, tools and activities for users, which can effectively help users record and manage their health and acquire scientific knowledge.

③ Medical resources

It mainly builds its own medical team, and connects to external resources including: more than 160 medical beauty institutions, 430 traditional Chinese medicine clinics, nearly 2,300 physical examination centers, nearly 1,800 dental clinics, more than 2,000 offline health management businesses, more than 50,000 clinics and 151,000 pharmacies.

In terms of Internet hospitals, Ping An Good Doctor announced that it has reached Internet hospital cooperation agreements with more than 120 offline hospitals, 50 of which have already been launched.

2) WeDoctor

① Financing history

WeDoctor was founded in 2012, and its core business is online diagnosis and treatment between doctors and patients and remote consultation between doctors.

② Business module

WeDoctor, WePharmacy, WeDoctor Cloud, and WeDoctor Insurance.

MicroMedical serves users through the medical service model of "general practice + specialist, online + offline". Through the collaboration between general practitioners and specialists, online and offline, it forms an efficient medical supply network to provide patients with managed medical and health services for the whole person, throughout the entire process, and for the whole family.

WeMedicine connects hospital information systems, retail pharmacy drug distribution and delivery systems, and medical insurance settlement systems through a prescription sharing platform to realize the sharing and application of medical information.

WeDoctor Cloud is a national cloud platform for the medical and health industry. Relying on WeDoctor's data accumulation and scenario connection, it provides dozens of medical cloud and artificial intelligence solutions including Internet hospitals, Internet medical alliances, family doctor contracts, cloud pharmacies, medical AI-assisted diagnosis, drug and equipment procurement, smart medical insurance, etc. to various users such as governments, hospitals, primary medical institutions and medical and health companies.

WeDoctor Insurance incorporates insurance institutions to provide users with one-stop services for online purchase, health care and claims.

③ Medical resources

WeDoctor has connected more than 7,800 hospitals in China, including more than 95% of Grade A tertiary hospitals; there are more than 270,000 registered doctors, of which about 86% are attending physicians or above; among the 270,000 registered doctors, more than 150,000 can provide online diagnosis and treatment services, and about 120,000 are only for online appointments; in 2015, the country’s first Internet hospital, Wuzhen Hospital, was established. As of 2020, WeDoctor has a total of 27 Internet hospitals.

3) Summary

What are the similarities and differences between the business models of Ping An Health and WeDoctor?

① Similarities

Being in the Internet medical industry, the business model trends of both are the same, using the Internet or mobile Internet to provide users with convenient medical services and charging users value-added fees. Online, we provide services such as appointment registration, medical consultation, knowledge popularization, and medicine purchase. Offline, we improve the service system by building our own hospitals and clinics and cooperating with offline physical hospitals.

② Differences

Although both are Internet medical companies, the paths taken by the two companies are very different.

WeDoctor's strategy is to "dance with policies and focus on the two core areas of hospitals and doctors", start from the supply side, communicate with health and family planning commissions or hospitals at all levels, build regional tiered diagnosis and treatment platforms, Internet hospitals and medical alliance platforms, and continuously integrate hospital and doctor resources. This can be summarized as integrating resources in 2B or 2G first and then providing services in 2C.

WeDoctor readjusted its business segments in 2018 and determined them as WeDoctor Healthcare, WeDoctor Pharmacy, WeDoctor Cloud, and WeDoctor Insurance. After 9 years of development, WeDoctor started from registration business and gradually developed business lines such as Internet hospitals, general practice clinics, drug stores, health malls, WeDoctor Cloud, commercial insurance, and smart terminals. It strives to integrate medical services, drug distribution, and commercial insurance to create an ACO closed loop, that is, to reduce medical costs while ensuring the quality of medical care.

Ping An Health's approach is a pure Internet strategy. It starts from the user end, provides the core service of doctor-patient communication to the extreme at low price or for free, and monetizes traffic through e-commerce.

Therefore, unlike WeDoctor, Ping An Health does not spend a lot of energy on integrating offline hospitals and doctor resources. It focuses more on providing services directly to the C-end. In order to maximize doctor-patient communication, we spared no expense to build a medical team of nearly 1,800 people, and introduced intelligent triage, queuing, pre-diagnosis information collection, auxiliary diagnosis and treatment knowledge base, etc. in the consultation process to improve the "online consultation" experience and satisfaction.

3. User Value Analysis

In the Internet medical market, there are four main participants: users, doctors, hospitals, and platforms.

The business logic diagram of Ping An Health is as follows:

If the platform wants to achieve rapid growth, it must meet the needs of hospitals and doctors, as well as the demands of users.

Next, let’s explore the needs of these three parties and how Ping An Health can better meet their needs.

1. User

According to iResearch user surveys, users' dissatisfaction with traditional medical care mainly comes from the fact that they have no time to see a doctor on weekdays and the long waiting times for picking up medicine, hospitalization, and examinations. Following the issue of dissatisfaction with wasting time are the need for high-quality medical resources (specialist clinics), lack of detailed medical guidance and unclear medical details.

The number of large-scale tertiary comprehensive hospitals only accounts for 4.5% of the total number of hospitals in the country. Under China's current national conditions, patients have low trust in hospitals other than tertiary hospitals, so they flock to tertiary hospitals, causing an extreme imbalance in medical resources and extending the waiting time for patients in every link from diagnosis and treatment to medication.

Therefore, saving time and improving diagnosis and treatment efficiency are the biggest motivations for users to switch from offline medical consumption to online medical consumption.

Data source: iResearch

At present, due to policy issues, it is impossible to subvert the medical industry purely through the Internet. Relevant departments need to modify the medical system from the source, but this cannot be changed overnight. What the Internet can do now is to help patients solve their current needs:

• Before consultation: improve the patient's queuing efficiency (or eliminate the need to queue), provide medical guidance, make appointments with well-known doctors, and make payments quickly;
• During diagnosis: rapid medical consultation;
• After diagnosis: quickly purchase and pick up medicines and have a follow-up visit.

2. Doctor

As the coverage of basic medical insurance in my country expands, people's demand for medical services is on the rise, and medical needs will gradually increase, but the growth rate of medical practitioners is slow. medical

The slow growth of medical practitioners has resulted in insufficient medical service supply. The reasons for the slow growth of doctors can be divided into the following points:

• There is a mismatch between senior doctors and patients, and a lack of matching patients with difficult and complicated diseases;
• The doctor promotion mechanism is based on the number of papers and professional titles, but there are currently many young doctors with low salaries and heavy workloads;
• Forty percent of doctors believe that the doctor-patient relationship is tense.

Data source: iResearch

Therefore, there are the following requirements for doctors:

• Increase revenue;
• Enhance your personal brand;
• Improve professional level.

3. Hospital

In my country, the imbalance of medical resources and the gap between urban and rural areas have resulted in overcrowding of tertiary hospitals in large cities, while health institutions in small towns are deserted.

With the development of urbanization, the full coverage of urban and rural medical insurance and the new rural cooperative medical system, and the improvement of people's living standards, people's unrestrained pursuit of diet, the increase of bad living habits, and the serious lack of exercise among urban residents, the trend of continued growth in the number of medical visits in large and medium-sized cities will continue to be unrelieved and may even become more serious.

How to control the flow of people is one of the key issues that hospitals need to consider.

4. Platform

From the above analysis, we can find that when it comes to seeing a doctor, users' pain points are the long time it takes to see a doctor, the need for high-quality medical resources (expert clinics), the lack of detailed medical guidance, and the lack of clarity about the details of medical treatment; doctors' needs are mainly to increase income, improve personal professional level, and build personal brand; hospitals need to solve the problem of congestion during peak hours or special periods.

How does Ping An Health, as a platform, better meet their needs and attract them to this platform?

1) Improve medical efficiency and save time

For users, basic daily health consultation, chronic disease management, simple symptoms and emergency guidance for sudden illnesses are all suitable for online consultation. The public's demand for online medical consultations is immediacy and reliability, and they hope to get reliable medical solutions as soon as possible.

Ping An Health uses AI-assisted diagnosis technology + its own medical team. Provide users with medical guidance before consultation, quickly match them with suitable doctors, and have a short response time and high efficiency, which can effectively save time for both doctors and patients.

The diagnosis platform will conduct systematic interviews on the condition. Doctors can quickly grasp the user's basic situation and then conduct detailed inquiries to achieve the purpose of prescribing the right medicine.

After the consultation, the user can place an order for medicine according to the doctor's prescription with one click, and the medicine will be delivered within one hour.

Users who want to make an appointment can click or search, and the platform will display the doctor's consultation hours, effectively avoiding the situation where offline users make a wasted trip or the appointments are fully booked for the day.

The platform saves users the trouble of queuing up offline to register for medical treatment, pay fees, and pick up medicines, greatly improving the user's medical treatment efficiency and effectively reducing the user's time cost.

2) Providing high-quality medical services

Professional team of doctors.

The private doctors who provide direct services are 100 famous doctors from well-known hospitals such as 301 Hospital and Ruijin Hospital. They have more than 15 years of professional experience and are all part of Ping An Good Doctor's self-built doctor team, ensuring that they have sufficient online time. In addition, 5,000 doctors on the "Hurun-Ping An China Good Doctors List" and 1,000 overseas doctors have signed contracts to provide second consultations.

Ping An Health continues to strengthen its own medical team internally and expand cooperation resources with external specialists and expert doctors externally. It continues to upgrade doctor resources from both internal and external sources, making "general practitioners more comprehensive and specialists more specialized", helping the people to see good doctors and famous doctors more conveniently and economically.

Full response.

The platform's own doctors provide 24/7 consultation, so users can consult at any time.

During the consultation, the doctor will prescribe medicine and provide guidance on medication, as well as dietary precautions. After the consultation, users can add the doctor’s corporate WeChat for free consultation. This greatly solves the problem of users not having detailed medical guidance and details when seeking offline treatment.

3) Empowering doctors

Provide doctors with transparent income.

On the Ping An Health platform, the prices of the "private doctor" and "family doctor" versions range from RMB 499/year to RMB 1999/year. Although the single amount is relatively small, the signed companies all bring in large orders, with the single amount ranging from several million to tens of millions of yuan. This is the direct reason why "Private Doctor" can quickly exceed 300 million.

The external specialists recruited by Ping An Health to practice at multiple locations on the platform have also brought more economic returns to doctors in public hospitals and other systems.

Build a personal brand for doctors.

Doctors can provide high-quality online services to specific patient groups, gain brand and reputation online, rather than being trapped in the hospital's own system, thereby gaining their own sense of accomplishment.

It takes a process to successfully build a doctor’s personal brand IP. In this process, the doctor's personal brand value will continue to settle and accumulate until the quantitative change leads to qualitative change.

Help doctors conduct scientific research.

Obtaining appropriate and sufficient cases for scientific research is an effective way for doctors to advance in their careers. In offline hospitals, although famous doctors and big names have obtained patient traffic, the patient traffic is not pushed accurately. Doctors still need enough time to accumulate cases and conduct scientific research. On the Ping An Health platform, doctors can obtain the patients they need more accurately.

To sum up, Ping An Health can meet the professional needs of doctors at different levels.

For junior doctors, providing online services can increase their legal income, allow them to reach and manage more cases through efficient interactive platforms, and accelerate their career growth.

For senior doctors, providing online services can help them obtain more accurate patients, better conduct scientific research in the disease areas they focus on, and continuously improve their academic capabilities.

4) Offline traffic diversion to online

Combining the traditional medical process and the current situation of hospitals, it is not difficult to see that the main links that lead to large flow of people during peak hours and the inability to evacuate are: registration for consultation, examination by the doctor, billing and pricing, queuing for examinations, and queuing for medicine. Therefore, if we want to attract offline hospitals to cooperate with the platform, solving these difficulties of offline hospitals has become a top priority.

Ping An Health has moved this series of processes online. There are doctors online to provide consultation services at every time period, and the platform has opened an online payment function, one-click payment, and one-click ordering of medicines, which will be delivered on the same day.

Users who visit the doctor for the first time offline have to queue up to create a file first. The platform has enabled online file creation and online registration. The implementation of these functions can effectively alleviate the problem of high pressure in offline outpatient clinics.

And if it is an influenza outbreak or a situation similar to the new coronavirus occurs, such infectious diseases need to reduce the gathering of patients and reduce the risk of infection. Moreover, the long waiting time for offline medical treatment may result in users not receiving timely treatment. The platform not only meets the users' needs for medical services, but also greatly reduces the pressure on offline hospital outpatient clinics during the epidemic.

5) Summary

Through the above analysis, we can find that Ping An Health can indeed better meet the needs of hospitals. At the same time, Ping An Health can also well meet the core demands of excellent doctors, which explains why Ping An Health is so popular.

4. Commercial Value Analysis

Ping An Health’s current core business is to attract users with medical needs to the Ping An Health platform for online consultations and generate purchasing behavior through operations and promotions.

An important indicator for judging whether a business can develop healthily is revenue. Here we use GMV, the most commonly used data indicator in e-commerce, to analyze whether Ping An Health’s core business is healthy.

GMV=number of users*conversion rate*average order value. Number of users, conversion rate, average order value

The improvement of any indicator will have a positive impact on the overall revenue growth, so next we will focus on analyzing the means Ping An Health uses to improve these three key indicators.

1. Increase the number of platform users

In order to achieve sustained growth in revenue, a steady stream of new registered users is the most basic guarantee. So how does Ping An Health acquire registered users?

Ping An Good Doctor is backed by Ping An Group. According to data, about 49.5% of Ping An Good Doctor's registered users come from Ping An Group. We will not analyze this part in detail, but how are the remaining registered users obtained? There are two main strategies.

1) The platform itself attracts traffic

Method 1

Promote on TV shows.

For example, it sponsors Anhui Satellite TV's "Health Consultation" program.

Method 2

Cross-border cooperation.

For example, during the epidemic, Ping An Health provided free online medical consultation services. In order to expand the publicity of online free medical consultations, Ping An Health and as many as 20 platforms including Baidu, Gaotie Guanjia, Zhihu, etc. launched cross-field joint cooperation to fight the epidemic. Taking Moji Weather as an example, the two parties launched a special page "Anti-epidemic | Free Medical Consultation", and opened online consultation, home delivery of medicines and other services for users, with user satisfaction exceeding 98%.

Opening up medical consultation services to these platforms has greatly expanded the channels for reaching users.

Method 3

Leverage public welfare.

For example, it launched the Pink Ribbon Campaign to Care for Women's Breast Health, and launched an online recruitment on the platform to invite users to participate in free breast X-ray examinations; it cooperated with the China Rural Children's Serious Illness Medical Insurance Public Welfare Fund to provide serious illness medical insurance for sick children; it actively responded to the government's "Healthy China 2030" planning outline, and cooperated with local governments to promote the "Village Doctor" project.

Method 4

Run commercials.

A large number of advertisements are placed on platforms such as subways, buses, office buildings, and television.

Method 5

Ground promotion.

According to relevant personnel from Ping An Health, in the early stage of the APP's launch, the effect of online traffic diversion was general, so they combined it with offline ground promotion to increase the number of users.

2) Drain old users

Method 1

User fission.

Users on the platform can receive cash rewards by inviting new users to register, with the maximum reward being 100 yuan.

Method 2

Excellent word of mouth communication.

For medical products, word of mouth plays a critical role in attracting new customers, because medical products are a type of product that requires users to invest a lot of trust, so the cost of trust is very high.

During the epidemic, the 7X24-hour online free clinics provided by Ping An Health greatly increased users' acceptance and recognition of online consultation services, thereby establishing a good reputation for Ping An Health's core business.

Ping An Good Doctor's recently released semi-annual report shows that during the peak of the epidemic, the Ping An Good Doctor APP received more than 1.11 billion visits, the APP registration volume was 10 times that before the epidemic, and the average daily number of consultations for new users was 9 times that before the epidemic.

2. Improve conversion rate

After guiding users to the platform through various means, users are valuable to the platform only after they make purchasing decisions, that is, convert into paying users of the platform. So how does Ping An Health improve its conversion rate?

There are two channels for online consultation. One is quick consultation. The doctor automatically assigned by the AI ​​quick consultation system is free. If you choose a doctor specifically, you will need to pay.

Another option is to purchase the services of a family doctor or private doctor for an annual fee. This type of service covers one-stop medical services such as online consultation, offline registration, and dedicated doctor accompaniment.

1) Reduce user churn

The home page navigation lists several commonly used core functions to reduce user loss before reaching the core functions. Customers with clear medical needs can quickly find the entrance, reducing user loss due to complicated procedures and making medical consultation easier.

In addition, the platform has launched the "Step by Step Gold" campaign. After new users register, they are guided to complete novice tasks. The health money earned can be used to offset consultation fees, exchange for coupons or other products, attracting users to open the APP to participate in the event and reduce user churn.

2) Lowering the threshold for use

Ping An Health provides free quick consultation services. New users with medical needs can enjoy free online consultation services when they come to the platform. This greatly improves the consultation rate of the platform, making it easier for users to reach the drug purchase stage and achieve the conversion of new users.

The platform also provides limited-time free pre-diagnosis, through which users can make an appointment for consultation with famous doctors by having the pre-diagnosis doctor analyze and evaluate the condition. The second step of consultation with famous doctors is charged. This form can also effectively convert users and increase conversion rate.

3) Improve user trust and satisfaction

First, the doctor randomly assigned by the system will display his years of practice, praise rate, and number of patients he has served during the consultation process. Click on the avatar to see the doctor's profile and medical license.

Secondly, during the free and quick consultation process, Ping An Health did not reduce the quality of the free consultation in order to reduce costs. The consultation time is limited to 15-20 minutes, and if it is not over, you can continue for another 15 minutes for free.

Finally, the user’s rights and interests are protected throughout the entire consultation process by the “Consultation Worry-Free Insurance”. These can increase users’ trust and satisfaction with the platform, making medical consultations credible. The more users trust the platform, the greater the chance of successful user conversion.

4) Coupons

For new users who place their first order for medicine, coupons of a certain amount will be issued, thus guiding users to be more willing to place orders and pay.

New users are offered limited-time exclusive coupons to give them a “unique” mentality. When users reach the stage of purchasing medicines, the platform will distribute surprise benefits, giving users a sense of surprise that there is a discount when there was no discount before, and the order rate will be higher.

3. Increase average order value

The average order value is affected by two factors: the single purchase amount and the purchase frequency.

Next, let’s take a look at how the platform increases users’ purchase amount and frequency.

1) Increase the purchase amount

First, online consultation prices are stratified.

Ping An Health divides doctors’ service prices into different levels, allowing users to consult doctors of different price ranges according to their own needs. Once a doctor gains the trust of users, they are willing to pay a high price to consult a doctor with a high rate of positive reviews.

Secondly, launch the “family doctor” and “private doctor” products. Based on the different levels of user needs, the product system is divided into more diverse levels.

Different levels of membership service options are provided based on the actual health needs of different groups of people and family compositions. "Private doctor" provides services of different levels from 499 to 999, and "family doctor" provides personal protection version of 599 and small family protection version of 1299.

With the improvement of living standards, users of all ages have health problems. For families, the cost of going to the hospital is basically the same as the cost of purchasing family doctor services, but purchasing services is more worry-free, time-saving and labor-saving. Not only is there one-on-one doctor service online, but there are also specialized doctors accompanying you throughout your offline hospital visits.

2) Increase purchase frequency

Increasing purchase frequency is mainly to improve user experience. If patients have a poor experience on the platform, they will most likely not continue to stay on the platform.

Factors that affect user experience include: doctor quality, answer quality, response speed, consultation price, medical guidance, doctor's attitude, medical process, etc.

The first is the quality of doctors.

If the quality of doctors is not high, users will be reluctant to use the platform, whether it is a free channel or a paid channel.

The private doctors who directly provide services to Ping An Health are 100 famous doctors from well-known hospitals such as 301 Hospital and Ruijin Hospital. They have more than 15 years of working experience and are all self-built doctor teams, ensuring sufficient online time. In addition, 5,000 doctors on the "Hurun-Ping An China Good Doctor List" and 1,000 overseas doctors have signed contracts to provide second consultations.

At the same time, Ping An Health launched the "Full-process Online Medical Security Protection" service.

Before the consultation, the platform ensures that the information displayed by the doctor is authentic; after initiating the consultation, the user can get a response from the doctor in a very short time, allowing patients to completely bid farewell to the medical experience of "waiting in line for two hours and seeing the doctor for five minutes"; at the end of the consultation, the platform provides liability guarantee for the accuracy of the expert's diagnosis; the platform ensures that the prescription received by the user is confirmed by the attending doctor, ensuring the professionalism and safety of the prescription.

When paying for prescription orders, the user's personal privacy is guaranteed; when placing drug orders, the drug delivery is guaranteed to be accurate and delivered within the promised time; in addition, Ping An Medical Home also provides quality assurance for the drugs in the order.

All of the above measures will help improve the quality of the platform's online medical consultation services and enhance user stickiness to the platform, so that they will still choose Ping An Health the next time they need a consultation.

From the above analysis, we can find that in order to obtain revenue, Ping An Health continues to attract new users and improve conversion rates and average order value. At present, the results are still very good, so investors continue to increase their investment because Ping An Health’s commercial value is still very large.

5. Product Iteration Analysis

In order to deeply analyze the version iteration rhythm of Ping An Health and explore the product iteration logic, the author has summarized all the core version iterations of Ping An Health from V2.0.0 to V7.24.1 as follows.

The following curve chart was drawn based on the cumulative download data statistics of Ping An Health on Kuchuan data. It can be seen that since V2.0.0 (that is, starting from April 7, 2015), the user growth curvature has continued to increase, which is an "S-shaped" curve.

Based on Ping An Health’s user growth curve and the version iteration path, Ping An Health is divided into three stages for analysis.

1. Phase 1

Before May 2016, versions V2.0-V2.10 were the cold start phase of mobile products. The three modules of Ping An Health when it first went online were family doctor, online consultation and health community.

Ping An Health is backed by Ping An Group. In the early stages, it mainly supplied a large number of users to Ping An Group through bundling promotion of other businesses of Ping An Group, so both user retention and user experience need to be considered.

Ping An Health uses its own team of doctors as its entry point, and its service objects cover individual users and families. Building our own team of doctors allows doctors to focus on improving the consultation experience for users. We will strengthen the establishment of health communities, increase various health-related popular information content, enrich the user experience, and add a one-click quick consultation function to medical services to facilitate users to quickly seek medical treatment; all of these are to enhance the user experience on the platform.

At this stage, if only a single online consultation scenario is established, it will be difficult to improve user retention and conversion rates. Therefore, during this stage, Ping An Health has also launched consumer medical services such as medicine purchase functions, health check-ups, genetic testing, and chronic disease service functions. These functions are all designed to meet more user needs.

2. Second stage

Enriching operational tools and exploring ways to increase user usage scenarios From December 2015 to April 2017, the version increased from V2.10.0 to V4.3.0, which was a period of rapid growth for Ping An Health. It can be seen that the user growth rate continued to rise during this stage.

During this stage, Ping An Health itself has increased its promotion and drainage efforts, including investing in a large number of commercial advertisements, offline promotion, and holding offline online activities. In this stage, increasing efforts to expand the number of users and retaining old users have become the focus of product iteration.

During this stage, after continuous iteration, online consultation, health headlines, and business modules of health malls have been formed.

On the one hand, Ping An Health launched a series of game-oriented functions such as winning gold step by step, winning treasure step by step, winning treasure step by step, winning treasure from the map, etc., which not only encourages old users to attract new products (recommended friends to register successfully), but also increases the activity of old users and increases user stickiness. For example, you can change products by opening the APP every day.

On the other hand, Ping An Health is constantly improving online medical services. The one-click registration, video consultation, good doctor home service, psychological counseling, and paid diagnosis functions for expert doctor groups are launched.

In addition, Ping An Health also pays attention to content marketing, launches healthy headlines and healthy live broadcasts to meet users' content needs and cultivate users' habits of high-frequency dependence.

3. Stage 3

The combination of online and offline solutions to solve user demand from May 2017 to the present, and the version has gone from V5.0.0 to V7.24.1, which is also a rapid growth period for Ping An Health. The user growth rate continues to rise. During this period, the epidemic has been boosted, but there is a trend of slowing down.

After continuous iteration, business modules for online medical care, consumer medical care, health mall, health management and interactive have been formed.

At this stage, Ping An Health optimized the online consultation and drug purchase functions, realizing the function of delivering drugs in one hour, and solving the need for timely medication use.

During the epidemic, Ping An Health was the first to launch the full-day free medical consultation and free collar mask activity function, bringing considerable user growth to Ping An Health. The "go to the hospital" function is launched and actively cooperate with offline hospitals, so that the entire process of online consultation, home delivery, referral, registration, and hospitalization arrangement can be realized, forming an online + offline closed loop.

Moreover, Ping An Health Insurance Service Function was launched this year, covering medical insurance and commercial insurance, further improving users' needs for medical treatment. Judging from the data, the user growth rate did not slow down at this stage, which shows that Ping An Health's series of actions at the product level and operation level have achieved good results in this stage.

Overall , Ping An Healthy has a particularly good sense of rhythm. Since Ping An Health had already used mature online medical products like Chunyu Doctor to learn from before it was launched, it was constantly improving product functions and operating promotion in the basic online consultation functions and expanding the audience. After continuous version iteration, online medical services have been continuously improved, and innovative cooperation models integrating medical, drug and insurance have been used to solve the three major problems of user diagnosis and treatment, drug purchase and payment.

At the same time, the platform focuses on the operation of Health Headlines to increase user stickiness. Coupled with the continuous operational activities, it can attract new things, promote vitality, retain and transform, while increasing user stickiness, improving user experience, and creating brand reputation.

6. Product structure analysis

In the iterative analysis, we analyzed the iterative steps of Ping An Health's product functions. Next, let's take a look at what users' needs meet and how they are distributed throughout the APP.

This is mainly analyzed through product structure. The following figure is the product structure brain diagram of Ping An Health V7.24.1:

For the sake of analysis, the author will get the following table by re-examining Ping An Health’s product structure according to users, scenarios, needs and functional modules:

Overall analysis

Because the main target users of the mobile terminal are groups who have the needs of consultation, medical treatment, and drug purchase, and are interested in health and medical knowledge, the focus is on meeting the potential needs of this group of people.

When users use Ping An Health, there are two scenarios:

1. Before consultation, learn about what you care about through the APP;
2. After consultation, operate on the corresponding needs on the platform.

Scenario 1: What needs did the user have before the consultation and what functions does Ping An Health meet this needs?

Before the consultation, users open the platform, but do not know about this platform. They can briefly enter their own symptoms through the homepage "Quick Consultation" to achieve the need for rapid consultation.

If users want to find the corresponding department to view the specific doctor, understand the doctor's personal information and service quality, and then choose the doctor for consultation, it can be achieved through the homepage "Specialty and Special Diseases".

If users want to analyze and evaluate the condition, then decide whether to go to the hospital or conduct online consultation. This can be achieved through the online prediagnosis function of "Famous Doctors and Experts" on the homepage.

If users want to know about family doctor services, they can learn about different versions of packages through the "Family Doctor" function on the homepage.

Users can also receive consultation coupons through the "Today's Welfare" and "New User Welfare" functions on the homepage.

After having a preliminary understanding of the platform, users also want to know which drugs can be purchased for some simple diseases, and read real and reliable medical consultation/videos. These needs can be met through functional modules such as "Ask for medicine and purchase medicine", "Live video broadcast", "Famous doctor lecture hall" and "Doctor talk" on the homepage.

As well as services with higher consumption frequency of users, such as physical examinations and appointments for vaccines, you can find them on the homepage.

All the functions mentioned just now can easily find the entrance on the product homepage, and this design is quite reasonable. Because as a brand new user, after registering, you can directly enter the homepage, and all the content users want to know can be found quickly, and the operation cost is very low.

Moreover, the functions that meet the diverse consultation needs of different users and the entrance to receive consultation discounts and benefits are placed on the home page, which can encourage users to use Ping An Health functions to meet their needs, reduce user churn rate, and increase user conversion rate.

Scenario 2: What are the needs after consultation and how does the platform meet?

For users who want to purchase family doctor services, after consultation, the online doctor will choose the appropriate plan for the user based on the user's situation, and the user can voluntarily choose whether to purchase.

If the user still has questions, you can quickly find the conversation just now through the "Message" button in the upper right corner of the homepage and ask the question again.

Whether it is a free consultation or a paid consultation, after the consultation, the doctor will prescribe an electronic prescription based on the diagnosis. If the condition is mild, you can first use medication to treat it. Users can place an order directly with one click or use the "Ask for medicine and purchase medicine" function on the homepage to purchase medicines according to the prescription.

If the online diagnosis doctor recommends going offline for further detailed examinations, users can choose the right time and register with the hospital on the homepage through the "Appointment Registration" entrance, and go to offline diagnosis and treatment.

In addition, after the consultation, there may be a demand for purchasing health care products and rehabilitation equipment. Users can directly enter the health mall through the Tab column at the bottom, and can quickly find products through the search bar at the top or enter the corresponding product module through the category classification at the top to purchase.

After the consultation, users can evaluate the doctor's services, which in turn motivates doctors to provide high-quality services during the consultation process to obtain high evaluations and thus bring more consultations.

Every time a consultation is completed, the corresponding medical records will be generated in the health record, which will record the medical treatment process and prescription in detail. You can also add family information to help the family consult online to form a family's health record.

If the user wants to have a follow-up visit, he can quickly find the last consultation conversation through the "Message" button in the upper right corner of the homepage, select the doctor or reselect a doctor for a follow-up visit, or you can also enter the "My" page through the "My" Tab column at the bottom and click "Go to follow-up visit" in "My consultation".

From the above analysis, we can find that Ping An Health's functional design can well meet the needs of users in the two scenarios before and after consultation. At the same time, the high-frequency functions required by different users have a prominent focus and reasonable distribution in the product structure, which can be considered a product with relatively excellent design.

7. Operational Path Analysis

The saying "Products are responsible for giving birth, and operations are responsible for raising them" also indirectly reflects the close relationship between products and operations.

So how did Ping An Health operate this product so that it can grow rapidly in a short period of time?

The author has reviewed Ping An Health since its establishment, and according to the AARRR model, the main operating activities are sorted out as follows.

1. Attract new customers (A)

In order to attract new products, Ping An Health mainly uses the following methods.

Method 1: Celebrity endorsement

On 2016-07-12, Ping An Health announced that Liu Tao would become his chief health officer (CHO, Chief Health Officer) and shareholder.

On 2018-07-10, Ping An Health officially announced that "National Cheetah" Zheng Kai has become its new brand spokesperson.

Method 2: Name a popular variety show

2020-04-06, Ping An Health announced the naming of Anhui Satellite TV's "Health Consultation", which will be held by Ping An Health's famous doctors.

Method 3: Cross-border cooperation

During the epidemic, Ping An Health connected with more than 30 leading industry companies including Baidu, Enterprise WeChat, Pinduoduo, Meituan Dianping, Kuaishou, Weibo, Moji Weather, Zhihu, Himalaya, and High-speed Railway Butler, and outputs 24-hour online consultation services, providing instant updates to epidemic news and medical popularization content.

For example:

2020-01-19, Ping An Health and the domestic professional intelligent travel platform Flight Manager & High-speed Railway Manager jointly announced that the two parties have reached in-depth cooperation. After cooperation, users can enjoy the online consultation services provided by Ping An Good Doctor through the Flight Butler Quick App and the High-speed Rail Butler APP/Quick App.

2020-03-10, Ping An Health announced that it has reached in-depth cooperation with Moji Weather and will launch online consultation and health management services on the homepage of Moji Weather APP.

2. Stimulate activity (A)

After the user downloads and registers the app, he needs to activate the user to open the app, thereby improving the daily and monthly active users. Ping An Health's main methods to improve the user's activity are:

Method 1: Through push message

• Daily health funds are collected;
• Fully exchanged for goods at 0 yuan;
• Do a task draw;
• Promotional activities push, such as 618 and Double Eleven;
• Push limited-time promotions, such as customizing personal health management plans for free for a limited time;
• Push hot news and health knowledge.

Method 2: Build a user incentive system

• Sign in and receive red envelopes every day, sign in and receive large red envelopes and large coupons in succession;
• Obtain cumulative experience value on consumer shopping and designated interactive behaviors on the platform (such as Jibulingjin, doctor consultation, etc.) to improve membership level.

3. Improve retention (R)

After promoting user activity, it is also necessary to improve user retention rate in order to continuously create value for the platform.

In order to improve user retention rate, Ping An Health has mainly done the following:

• The step-by-step gold grab activity is calculated and exchanged for health funds every day;
• Cloud Farm. Free exchange of cattle for commodities, including daily check-in and daily activities to earn feed;
• Sign in and receive red envelopes every day, sign in and receive large red envelopes and large coupons in succession;
• Push message push: push related products, live broadcasts, information, etc. based on the content of user consultation, search, and browsing;
• Long-term behavior accumulation - member growth system, the system obtains cumulative experience value based on users' consumption and shopping on the platform in the past 12 months (such as Jibulingjin, doctor consultation, etc.), and can be upgraded by reaching the corresponding threshold. The higher the membership level, the more rights you can enjoy, such as exclusive red envelopes, exclusive celebrity coaches, exclusive redemption, etc.

4. Share and spread (R)

In order to guide users to spread spontaneously, Ping An Health has mainly done the following things.

Help public welfare and create a good corporate image. For example, in October 2015, we launched a campaign to care for women's breast health to help pink ribbons, and launched an online recruitment and inviting users to participate in free breast X-ray examinations on the platform.

In 2016, we joined forces with the China Rural Children's Serious Illness Medical Insurance Public Welfare Fund to provide serious illness medical insurance for sick children.

In 2018, Ping An Health actively responded to the government's "Healthy China 2030" planning outline and cooperated with local governments to promote the "village doctor" project; Ping An Health launched the 2020 million-level "Transfer Medicines to the Countryside" charity activity at the end of 2019, and launched a new round of million-level "Transfer Medicines to the Countryside" charity activity in May 2020.

Recommendations are rewarded. Users on the platform can receive cash rewards by inviting new users to register, with a maximum reward of 100 yuan.

5. Increase income (R)

We have introduced in detail the methods to increase revenue in the business value analysis section, so we will not repeat them here.

8. Analysis and summary

Through the overall analysis of the Internet medical market and Ping An Health, we can draw the following conclusions.

1) Common factors such as policies, economy, society and culture, and technology have promoted the development of Internet medical health in recent years, and will continue to maintain a certain high growth rate in the next few years.

2) In this industry, Ping An Health has obvious advantages in corporate revenue and user scale, has a large number of active users, has strong industry influence and huge potential; and compared with competitors, its advantage lies in providing services to C-end users and improving user experience and satisfaction.

3) In the Internet online medical market, there are four main participants: users, doctors, hospitals, and platforms. If the platform wants to achieve rapid growth, it must solve the pain points of users, doctors, and hospitals, so that user value can be continuously generated.

4) Ping An Health’s current core business is online medical care. In order to achieve positive revenue growth, first, Ping An Health continuously acquires new users through various methods such as paid and free; second, Ping An Health carefully polishes all links and details of the consultation based on the user's consultation path, so as to successfully complete the conversion; finally, Ping An Health increases the single purchase amount through consultation price grading, and then stimulates users' consumption frequency in consumer medical and health malls through activities and coupons, thereby achieving an increase in customer unit price.

5) Overall, Ping An Health's development has been divided into three stages since its establishment. The first stage is to acquire users and polish core functions; the second stage is to expand users to retain old users, expand user usage scenarios to improve online scenarios; the third stage is to combine online and offline to maintain market share without declining.

6) Ping An Health’s target users are medical needs and health needs, and all functional designs are centered around meeting user needs. The scenarios for users to use Ping An Health are mainly divided into before and after consultation. Through the review of Ping An Health Function, it was found that it has met the various needs of users for online consultation, and a good user experience is the vitality of a product.

Operation is crucial to the development of a product. It can be seen that Ping An Health has done a lot of work in attracting new products, promoting vitality, retention, and self-dissemination, and the results are good at present.

Above, the author systematically analyzed the reasons behind Ping An Health's rise from seven parts, including industry, competitors, user value, commercial value, product iteration, product structure, and operation. It can be seen that no product can be successful casually, which must be the comprehensive role of internal and external reasons such as "time, place, and people".

IX. Future Outlook/Optimization Suggestions

Through the above analysis, we have understood the reasons for the rapid rise of Ping An Health. So where will this "head" unicorn go in the future?

Next, the author will use the SWOT model to conduct a system analysis, hoping to draw effective conclusions from it.

Through the above analysis, we can see that if Ping An Health wants to continue to develop and obtain new financing, it will win the favor of the market:

1) We must work hard to change the current profit model.

For example, when laying out post-diagnosis services, currently, compared with medical platforms such as registration and consultation, there are much less competitiveness in medical treatment stages such as diagnosis, nursing, and rehabilitation, which have obvious medical attributes.

Especially after the diagnosis, post-diagnosis services are the most concentrated scenario, whether in the inpatient department, at the patient's home or in the rehabilitation center. At present, most Internet medical companies focus on pre-diagnosis and during diagnosis, and the market space after diagnosis is huge.

2) Reduce excessive dependence on Ping An Group and strengthen its own independence.

On the one hand, what Ping An Health needs to do is to establish cooperative relationships with other companies, jointly develop with multiple offline hospitals and institutions, achieve resource interconnection, and bring more choices to companies.

It can also reduce the impact of Ping An Group on the platform, after all, multiple partners have multiple ways out.

On the other hand, in addition to core services, Ping An Health provides all but inaccurate services, such as too few physical examination appointments, too single oral business, lack of shaping and postpartum rehabilitation content, and services in vertical segments need to be further improved.

3) After online consultation and AI technology services have captured the favor of more and more users, can we try to explore the use of artificial intelligence in more medical scenarios?

Now it is only used for pre-diagnosis intelligent diagnosis and triage. In the future, artificial intelligence will inevitably have great application prospects in medical care. This attempt can make online medical care more practical and improve its own moat. This can also form differentiated competition with direct competitors such as WeDoctor to consolidate your advantages.

4) Continue to re-invest the investment model to build Internet hospitals.

It is difficult to establish a complete business closed loop simply by relying on online traffic, after all, the medical problems that can be solved online are very small.

Under the existing policy system, online consultation, doctor-patient interaction, registration, referral, etc. are medical peripheral behaviors, and substantive diagnosis and treatment behaviors such as diagnosis, examination and surgery still need to return to offline hospitals.

Moreover, the advantage of Internet hospitals is that they are controllable throughout the process and can realize a closed loop online and offline. It can effectively avoid the occurrence of medical safety hazards, and at the same time, the difficulty of accessing medical insurance in various places will be greatly reduced.

5) Pay attention to the maintenance of brand image.

Although Ping An Health is getting bigger and bigger in its business, it has been accused of infringement and lost trademark lawsuits, which has caused Ping An Good Doctor App to change its name and false marketing activities, which will harm its brand image.

You cannot underestimate things other than these business. Maybe users have a bad impression of the platform because of things that have nothing to do with the main business and services.

6) For Ping An Health Products itself, the author believes that there are several points that can be optimized.

① As a health headline section that improves user activity and stickiness, it is necessary to further streamline the content types of the health section.

For modules such as video, short video, live broadcast, Q&A, etc., they are more functional classifications, not information labels. These functions can be independently made into healthy video, health Q&A and other sections.

In addition, from the content itself and user review feedback, some health information on the platform are similar to small advertisements, and there are a lot of reprinted content. The reprinted content comes from different platforms, and some content is not deep enough, just to attract users' attention, which has no nutritional value to users.

② The advertisements are flooded, and the product functional interface has many other product promotions and product promotions, reducing the user experience; the two functional modules of medical consultation and health management are mixed, the complexity of the product is improved, and the product interface is not simple enough.

③ The function is poorly simplified. This product has extended a large number of functions to meet the needs of users in all aspects, making the product's functional structure very large. However, some functions may only be used by a small number of users. I personally believe that functions should be simplified to improve the visibility of the interface.

Author: Wang Zai 0657

Source: Wang Zai 0657