ON the second floor of a new office building in downtown Beijing, rows of people with headphones sit five abreast, typing furiously. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts, they could easily be mistaken for office clerks or call-center workers — except for the white coats over the backs of their chairs and signs hanging overhead that read: “Internal Medicine,” “Pediatrics,” “Gynecology,” and “Obstetrics.”

In one corner of this sprawling office sat Liu Sainan, a 47-year-old neurologist. In March, after 16 years at a top Beijing hospital, she joined Shanghai-based Ping An Healthcare & Technology Co., which runs the Ping An Good Doctor app. These days she treats patients via online messaging through the app, juggling as many as 10 people at once. Patients can also send pictures of symptoms, such as bruises, or their test results. Good Doctor, which is backed by the country’s top insurer, Ping An Insurance Group Co. of China Ltd., started a yearly subscription service in August that offers online medical consultations with senior doctors.

Users pay an annual fee of 499 yuan (US$70) to 1,999 yuan to consult specialists about everything from hypertension to the digestive problems of newborns—anytime and from anywhere.

The business is an attempt to remake China’s overstretched health-care system for the Internet era. The country’s technology industry has already transformed the way consumers shop, hail taxis, and order takeout meals. Now companies from Good Doctor to Alibaba to Tencent are attempting to do the same with health care.

Their hope is to use digital services to reach patients frustrated with a public health system that’s having trouble meeting demand for treatment.

Online health care in China is poised to explode into a 198 billion yuan business by 2026, or almost 20 times its 2016 size of 11 billion yuan, predicts researcher Frost & Sullivan.

“Everyone in the business is exploring, and investors are watching, to see how Internet health-care companies can make a profit,” said Good Doctor’s chief executive officer Wang Tao. “We’ve figured out clearly that family doctor [service] will be the driver.”

Wang said his company aims to sign up 10 million families in the next five years and generate 10 billion yuan in annual revenue from them.

That’s three times the company’s 2018 sales of 3.3 billion yuan, most of which came from online sales of health-care products and supplements. The company expects to become profitable by 2021.

Several technology companies are jumping in to fill that gap. WeDoctor, backed by Tencent Holdings Ltd., said its online platform can potentially connect more than 200 million users to doctors from hospitals across the country.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.-backed Alibaba Health has signed up some 15,000 senior doctors to offer health consultation services via the Internet for users of its online retail marketplace and its payment app Alipay.

And Good Doctor has already begun exporting its model overseas. It’s set up joint ventures with Singapore’s Grab Holdings Inc. and Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. to offer online treatment consultation services in Southeast Asia and Japan.

The industry could eventually get a boost from government policies. China has taken some steps to make it easier to get public insurance reimbursements for some online health-care services, though local governments can decide what will be covered.

(SD-Agencies)