China Awaits Doctor Appointment System

From last October, all the tier-3 hospitals in China, the highest ranked and best equipped public hospitals, were required by the Ministry of Health to provide clinic appointment services. The national initiative of building the clinic appointment system aims to reach these objectives: 1) arrange doctors' agenda better, 2) reduce patients' wait time, and 3) provide better medical consultation. In shorter words, in face of pressing healthcare issues, the government kicks off a service initiative to improve the healthcare efficiency as well as work quality. 

Making doctor appointments is common in most developed countries, but it hasn't been put into public use in China before. You can go to the hospital anytime and get a queue number at the outpatient counter. The counter staff then dispatches you to a medical division and you wait outside the diagnosis room till your number is called. Waiting is not a nice thing in any scenario, not to mention when you are feeling sick. Seeing a doctor is like going on a blind date. You don't know who you'll meet and what you would expect in the hospital. All you know is that you feel not well and probably nervous in the medical environment. 

So building an appointment system is a good idea for Chinese patients. It's good to arrange agenda beforehand and saves a lot of time for patients. But the advantages of the system are larger than that. If a doctor knows that a patient comes the next day, he or she may provide some pre-clinic tips to the patient and the patient, on the other hand, may be more aware of useful medical information or more prepared for the coming test if needed. More importantly, the appointment system sets the foundation of an active network between doctors and patients. Both parties can be connected closer and communicate more efficiently with the aid of other widgets on top of the system. Take Hello Health for example. The new online service targets to bring the doctor and the patient back together through its online system and reinvigorate the person-oriented bond by giving participants email and mobile tools. 

Breaking the complex and stagnant healthcare system boundary and connecting real people together is a trend gaining increasing momentum. This trend has been recognized and valued not only by medical professionals but also by healthcare marketers. A.D.A.M., Inc. partners with a team of online health service providers to design an iPhone application called Medzio to allow users to navigate the local healthcare resources such as pharmacies and clinics. Johnson & Johnson sponsors an online community called Strength for Caring and makes an affiliated iPhone application called Care Connector that helps users manage medical profiles of those whom they take care of and connect with care givers' conversations.

Looking back to the toddling appointment system that China is promoting, we lack those tools. We don't even have the foundation system ready yet and the population is unfamiliar with the potentially much-nicer experience. Currently, hospitals are trying to set up their hotlines to deal with the appointment scheduling. Only a few started to play with the very rough html web pages. Even the private health management companies like iKang offers not much more than a nice-looking list of hospitals and a good call center. 

Opportunities lie in the opening door of a good digital appointment system and its extended applications. Before grounding those opportunities into meaningful businesses, the siloed efforts of hospital hotlines need integrating as a whole. The technology part itself is not as hard as devising a smart game plan for platform partnership. Any potential winner must not only think of how to create a good product that fits in the local context and simplifies user experience through the patient-doctor touch points, but also weigh the value proposition it offers to the medical professionals and hospitals, in terms of either sharing profit or digging in the information treasure or improving performance. I'm positive to see the changing landscape in China's healthcare, though it takes time and vision to translate incremental efforts into a breakthrough. I don't know yet who's stepping up to fill in the role. But I know that none of the other digital and wireless applications or services in healthcare could pick up the trend easily in China without one setting up the foundation for the ecosystem.