Cover Image | Visual China
In March of this year, tech giants like Nvidia and Google expressed their emphasis on AI in healthcare, reigniting interest in this field across the market.
Over the past six years, nearly 100 billion yuan has been invested in the AI healthcare sector, driving rapid development in areas such as imaging AI, new drug development AI, robotics AI, and smart hospitals.
Currently, the healthcare sector is one of the areas where AI technology is most widely applied and has shown the most significant results. AI is no longer just simply replacing or optimizing human work; it is beginning to genuinely participate in reshaping healthcare processes, entering the AI+Healthcare 2.0 era.
Speaking of the AI+Healthcare 2.0 era, one of the most pressing scenarios with urgent restructuring needs is offline healthcare, such as hospitals and health check centers.
However, there is currently no major AI company that can integrate these applications in offline healthcare, resulting in many artificial intelligence applications in this scenario being scattered and intermittent, making it difficult to maximize their value.
Regrettably, we have not seen many truly implemented and well-functioning AI 2.0 cases in offline healthcare scenarios.
So, in the AI 2.0 era, what kind of companies can go further down the path of healthcare commercialization?
How to Become a Co-builder of the AI 2.0 Era?
Let’s return to the initial question: Why does offline healthcare need to integrate the entire process around AI?
Is it to further help various service institutions in offline healthcare reduce costs and increase efficiency? To enhance patient efficiency and alleviate the tension in medical resources? Or to optimize the medical experience for customers and patients? Or to manage customer health indicators throughout their life cycle?
Therefore, even though it is difficult, offline healthcare must inevitably take this step. The reason is that issues such as tight medical resources, poor patient experience, and high costs are all real challenges that offline healthcare currently faces and urgently needs to change.
Currently, who has the most motivation to invest significant resources to do this?
It must start with private healthcare chains that have a relatively high degree of commercialization and shorter decision-making chains, as this is a matter that affects the whole system. Only institutions with large scale and significant potential for transformation and upgrading can resolutely undertake such changes.
Meinian Health is one such chain health check institution with urgent needs.
According to data from the “China Health and Health Statistics Yearbook (2022)”, the number of health check-ups in China has grown from 230 million in 2009 to 549 million in 2021, with a penetration rate of about 38.88%, close to 40%.
Meinian Health has already achieved nearly a quarter of the market share in the private health check market, with only iKang Guobin having a market share exceeding 5%, while other hundreds of companies have very low market shares.
In other words, as an industry leader, Meinian Health can only rely on “self-reform” and “innovation” to maintain continuous performance growth.
This is also an important reason why, despite being a rather traditional offline chain operation, Meinian Health started early in AI and is now fully committed to becoming a co-builder of the AI 2.0 era.
A key step in this process is this year’s collaboration with Huawei Cloud to launch the “Health Xiaomei” intelligent health manager.
“Health Xiaomei” is a robot that utilizes generative AI technology and precise data-driven services to proactively monitor, detect, and predict users’ health conditions. Once successfully implemented, it will be the first health management AI robot in the country.
In simple terms, through this product, users can upload their personal lifestyle and exercise information to generate a personalized digital health profile, health check plan, and preventive measures with one click. This profile can also create a virtual “digital twin” for users through three-dimensional digital twin technology, providing a more intuitive simulation and understanding of their health status to track bodily changes.
Additionally, “Health Xiaomei” can actively engage in health Q&A with users, record their health data, health check reports, medical history, and other historical information, analyze and classify health risks in real-time, provide further health advice, and generate personalized health plans with reminders for execution. See the following image for a summary of “Health Xiaomei” features based on official WeChat updates.
For enterprises, by integrating the health check records retained by users at Meinian and the continuously collected information from “Health Xiaomei” (such as the intelligent health management platform and digital twin function), a comprehensive digital health record for users throughout their life cycle may eventually be constructed. Based on this, a series of value-added services expanded during the AI 1.0 era, such as post-check specialized services, genetic testing, chronic disease management, and health insurance, can be integrated to provide one-on-one, personalized health management services.
Meanwhile, the “Health Xiaomei” intelligent health manager’s backend will be fully integrated with Meinian Health’s Bianque intelligent health check management SAAS cloud platform, further upgrading the digital empowerment of the entire health check management process. In the future, users will see improvements from appointment scheduling, health checks, report interpretation, to subsequent health management and intervention.
The new platform will also strengthen deep cooperation with partners such as hospitals, insurance companies, and health management centers to build a more comprehensive health management ecosystem. Furthermore, it can provide value-added services for backend health management, such as remote image reading, specialized chronic disease management services, green medical passageways, innovative health insurance, and customized nutritional products.
As a result, the business processes at Meinian Health will change from previously providing corresponding services after users actively obtain information through health checks, to a model where “Health Xiaomei” monitors users’ health information and reminds them of their health conditions, proactively providing health management plans.
This sounds like quite an ambitious project. But the question is: why can Meinian Health undertake this AI 2.0 initiative?
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Meinian has nearly 600 health check centers as traffic entry points, providing services for about 30 million people annually, which provides a huge user base and data source for the construction of AI 2.0;
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Meinian has already built a digital health management platform during the AI 1.0 era;
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Meinian has been developing AI 1.0 for five years and has already expanded many application scenarios, such as lung nodules and fundus examinations.
For these three reasons, Meinian has the confidence to “bring capital into the group” in the tripartite cooperation with Huawei Cloud and Runda Medical. Meinian is genuinely progressing from the AI 1.0 era to the AI 2.0 era.
Next, let’s discuss the key driving events in Meinian’s transition from the AI 1.0 era to the AI 2.0 era.
The AI 1.0 era is the foundation for entering the 2.0 era.
Meinian Health can be considered a pioneer in the AI+Healthcare field.
Since its establishment, leveraging the favorable national policies supporting social medical practices and the rapidly replicable operational characteristics of health check services primarily based on medical equipment inspections and supplemented by doctor consultations, it has expanded quickly and become an industry leader.
Currently, Meinian Health has nearly 600 health check centers. Among them, 290 are holding centers, a more than ninefold increase from 32 centers in 2011.
Under scaled operations, Meinian Health faces long-term operational pressures, primarily in management and labor costs. On the other hand, as competition within the industry intensifies, accelerating diagnostic efficiency, enhancing user experience, and continuously improving medical quality and services will undoubtedly become a “differentiated advantage” and a necessary path to maintain competitive advantages in the industry.
In other words, “reducing costs, improving efficiency, and enhancing quality” are all indispensable, and this is a challenge that every health check institution must face after continuous growth.
In this context, Meinian Health chose to empower business optimization through AI.
The extensive application scenarios that Meinian actively laid out in the AI 1.0 era provide critical support and groundwork for transitioning to the 2.0 era.
1) Application Scenario Expansion
Since 2017, Meinian has launched several “specialized and new” series of products integrated with AI technology, including lung nodule AI, cardiovascular AI, fundus AI, ultrasound AI, and brain health AI projects, bringing performance growth.
Among them, the lung nodule AI-assisted diagnosis introduced in 2017 is currently the most widely used AI application at Meinian; the comprehensive lung health service package “Lung Jiening” launched in 2022 achieved a complete monitoring loop management of lung nodules, utilizing AI technology based on thin-slice CT and three-dimensional reconstruction technology to assist in discovering and diagnosing lung nodules, constructing a 3D whole lung map, and accurately locating lung nodules.
The specialized service product “Brain Ruijia” launched in 2022 for brain health assessment is the first innovative product in the country focusing on early screening for stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, based on high-precision brain MRI, applying imaging AI analysis technology and a full-brain standard database for the entire age range of the healthy Chinese population to identify early structural anomalies and functional degeneration in the brain.
In addition, in the past two years, Meinian Health has also launched AI coronary artery calcification scoring detection projects, based on artificial intelligence anti-motion artifact technology, automatically identifying coronary artery calcification in CT chest images as a basis for screening coronary heart disease risk in asymptomatic populations; and launched the AI-MDT multidisciplinary expert intelligent health management system, focusing on efficient and intelligent AI health assessments and proactive care health management, providing personalized health management reports through joint consultation analysis of health check reports and questionnaire results.
Currently, it appears that the screening effectiveness of Meinian Health’s AI-empowered diagnostic products is quite good.
In 2023, Meinian Health detected an average of about 16,011 lung nodules daily, with nearly 5.85 million detected throughout the year, resulting in a detection rate of 26.84%; simultaneously, it completed 2.88 million non-gated calcification scoring screenings, with a positive rate of about 6.03% and a severe positive rate of about 0.28%. Additionally, it has conducted brain health checks for over 100,000 people, with a high-risk abnormal detection rate of 14.14%, memory-related hippocampal abnormalities detected at 3.24%, and brain white matter high-signal abnormalities related to brain aging detected at 27.71%.
Source: Huxiu based on public information
In addition, Meinian has extended its services from pre-check services and in-check diagnostics to a series of value-added services such as post-check specialties, genetic testing, chronic disease management, and health insurance, leveraging its big data advantages, resulting in revenue growth across more application scenarios.
For example, in October 2022, Meinian Health launched the Zhuomu Bird AI-MDT health management system, a comprehensive and professional intelligent medical platform built in collaboration with multidisciplinary experts from top-tier hospitals. Based on artificial intelligence technology, it integrates the clinical experience of multidisciplinary clinical experts and the latest clinical guidelines and expert consensus from both domestic and international sources to provide personalized report interpretations after comprehensive health assessments for clients. At the same time, it customizes health management plans tailored to each client’s health check situation, assisting users in personalized health management.
Under the expansion of these AI-empowered application scenarios, the company’s revenue has also seen growth.
In 2023, the performance forecast indicated that Meinian achieved revenue between 10.73 billion and 11.05 billion yuan, with an average revenue of 10.89 billion yuan. Compared to 2017, the compound annual growth rate of Meinian’s revenue from 2017 to 2023 is 9.7%.
Looking ahead, with the ongoing aging population, screening demand will remain strong.
The above-mentioned expansion of application scenarios is based on Meinian Health’s nearly 600 health check centers, which provide tens of millions of traffic entry points each year.
2) Building a Digital Operation Platform to Improve Efficiency and Quality, Enhancing Customer Stickiness
Meinian Health leverages AI to empower its business, from initially launching the “WeChat + Alipay dual-end mini-programs” and the “Meinian Zhenxuan online mall mini-programs” to launching a cluster of medical technology platforms, including the Bianque intelligent health check management SAAS cloud platform, imaging PACS system, and laboratory quality control LIS system, addressing user services, assisted diagnosis, and data management from different angles, empowering quality and efficiency improvements across the entire health check process, and creating a relatively leading digital operation platform.
Functionally, after the implementation of the Bianque system, Meinian’s operation platform has gained a “brain” like that of a self-driving car. With AI technology, the Bianque system can automatically achieve time-based appointments, rapid registration, intelligent guidance, real-time data interchange, sample tracking, and automatic reporting of abnormal results without relying on human power, providing various refined services to customers before, during, and after health checks.
Meanwhile, the imaging PACS cloud platform can store, archive, and communicate vast amounts of medical images in digital form, improving the efficiency of doctors reading images and facilitating telemedicine; the LIS system enables intelligent upgrades in laboratory information management, processing vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, enhancing testing quality.
Through these three systems, the business efficiency and medical quality of the health check centers under Meinian have significantly improved, and professional, efficient services will enhance user stickiness, continually strengthening Meinian’s “user traffic entry advantage”.
Additionally, the national key R&D project “Construction of Health Check Big Data Cloud Platform” led and undertaken by Meinian Health has been completed. Relying on the large-scale, multimodal health check data accumulated over the years from more than 600 health check centers nationwide, over 130 million health check data entries have been gathered and governed, significantly addressing the pain point of clinical research data being limited to hospital data, lacking external data, and achieving cross-institution and cross-system data integration. This has further enhanced Meinian’s data advantages.
Source: Caitong Securities Research Report
In summary, Meinian Health has leveraged its large-scale traffic data entry advantage to expand more AI-empowered application scenarios, resulting in revenue growth.
Accordingly, the most motivated action for Meinian moving forward is to integrate its business scenarios, which is also the reason for launching the intelligent health manager “Health Xiaomei”.
It is reported that the internal test version of “Health Xiaomei” went live on April 15 this year and is currently being trialed at health check centers under Meinian Health. The next step is to formally apply it in business, making Meinian one of the few companies in the AI+Healthcare 2.0 era that have achieved medical commercialization.
So, how significant will the business transformation brought by “Health Xiaomei” be for its business development and performance drive? This may determine the future investment trends in the capital market.
For business development, the implementation of “Health Xiaomei” is expected to drive users from “single health check services” to “whole life cycle health management” and provide Meinian with a new performance growth engine based on its current health check business.
On one hand, the accumulated health check volume at Meinian Health over the years has reached hundreds of millions, and a significant proportion of health check clients are expected to be willing to pay extra for personalized, intelligent health management services. In the future, the value-added services provided by “Health Xiaomei” are expected to increase the average customer spending. If the average customer spending increases by 10%, it will bring considerable additional revenue to the business.
On the other hand, looking at the longer term, the backend value-added services from “Health Xiaomei” include remote image reading, specialized management services, green medical passageways, innovative health insurance, and customized nutritional product services, among others, as well as a series of innovative ecosystems that may arise in the future, such as smart wearable devices and digital therapies, which are expected to drive significant industry scale growth. This is on the qualitative level.
On the quantitative level, according to the “2024 China Health Management Industry Research Report” released by iResearch, the domestic health management market size is projected to reach 1.81 trillion yuan in 2023, with a predicted compound annual growth rate of 12.5% from 2023 to 2028, potentially reaching 3.26 trillion yuan by 2028, indicating nearly onefold growth potential in the next five years.
Thus, the launch of “Health Xiaomei” will allow Meinian Health to enjoy the growth dividends of the domestic health management track.
Optimistically, if “Health Xiaomei” can be implemented in 2024 and capture 1% of the market share that year, based on the projected market size of 2023 at 2.02 trillion yuan, it could bring over 20 billion yuan in revenue to Meinian.
Conservatively, if “Health Xiaomei” can be implemented within the next five years, as the industry market size grows, even if it captures 0.5% of the market share after going public, it could still bring over 10 billion yuan in incremental revenue to Meinian.
It is worth noting that Meinian Health’s revenue for 2023 is only around 10 billion yuan.
The integration of artificial intelligence and the healthcare industry is not easy; on one hand, it cannot stray from the inherent safety-first attributes of the healthcare industry; on the other hand, acquiring a large amount of user data and expanding more AI application scenarios is also crucial.
While ensuring these two points, Meinian Health has promoted the implementation of AI-empowered business efficiency and quality improvements, as well as the reshaping of business processes, which is expected to support its stable growth in performance over a longer period.
Of course, as a leading institution in health checks, Meinian will create a “demonstration effect” and may lead other companies in the health check industry to imitate its AI layout in the future.
Special Planning
