You might have already heard horror stories about going to a hospital in China WITH chaotic management and long waiting queues. As a native Chinese, I can tell you that a large proportion of them are true. On the bright side, modern technologies, especially the emerging mobile health services, are now bringing great changes to how Chinese patients get medical treatment.
Online medical service provider Guahao is one of the top players in this area. The company just revealed a $394 million USD Series C funding led by Hillhouse Capital and Goldman Sachs with participation of Fosun, Tencent and China Development Bank Capital. The massive round comes on heel of a $100 million USD investment led by Tencent last year.
Along with the funding news, Guahao announced a plan to re-brand the company as WeDoctor Group Limited, a new online healthcare entity incorporating three brands: website Guahao.com, mobile platform We Doctor, and We Doctor Accountable Care Organization, a family medical care management service.
Guahao started as an appointment scheduling site in 2010. It then gradually scaled up to a platform that now includes various medical-related services from online diagnosis and medical tips to rating hospitals and doctors.
As of August this year, the company claimed to have access to data from more than 1,600 hospitals in 25 provinces, registering north than 100 million verified users and 190,000 registered doctors.
The firm plans to invest $150 million USD ($94 million USD from current round and $56 million USD from reserved fund) to construct five regional surgical operation centers with excellent local medical institutions.
As online and mobile healthcare wave is gaining momentum in China, a handful of startups in this sector have pocketed large amounts of funding, such as DXY, Chunyu, Xingren Doctor, Quyi and Medlinker.
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Disclaimer: At Technode we do our best to verify funding and user numbers, but we are sometimes unable to verify the internal figures of some Chinese startups.