founder/managing director, Rubicon Strategy Group
Benjamin Shobert has worked across China and Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, helping healthcare and biotech companies build market access strategies and interact with key government officials in pursuit of improved healthcare outcomes and the development of innovative public-private partnerships. He is a frequent writer at Forbes, and his work has been featured at Harvard Asia Quarterly, Yale’s China Hands, CNBC, Fortune Magazine, and many others. In addition to his work with large healthcare and biotech companies, he teaches a class on the globalization of healthcare platforms and biotech companies at the University of Washington’s Foster MBA program.
Several years ago, it was common to hear healthcare consultants in China talk about how telehealth, electronic medical records (EMR), patient engagement platforms and other mHealth apps were going to leapfrog the capabilities and penetration levels of those in developed western markets. As might be expected given such high expectations, venture capital and hard R&D investments from large domestic and foreign companies flowed into China like a tsunami. But, as was pointed out by Bloomberg late last year, returns on these investments have been nearly impossible to find, and many of the earliest investors have fundamentally recalibrated their expectations for the digital and mHealth sector in China.
Why did this happen? How did an industry that was once put forward as the best example of China leapfrogging Western technology since the fax machine, just not deliver? There are five reasons, each of them illustrative of what companies working in China’s healthcare economy need to be mindful of.
In a world where unicorn valuations from start-ups like Uber or China’s equivalent Didi Chuxing make investors and consumers giddy, it can be easy to overlook that these on-demand models also need to create a positive experience for those on the other side of the equation: in Didi’s situation the drivers, and in the Chinese mHealth world, the physicians. mHealth platforms never answered the question of why physicians would be incentivized to drive patients to use any particular service. In addition, many physicians were not fully educated on how these mHealth apps would address care plan adherence, or medication management, or improved triage at point of care. Consequently, mHealth platforms missed the opportunity to leverage physicians as an advocate around guiding how the patient journey in China could have been enabled through mHealth.
Betting against China in general, and the ability of Chinese companies to innovate within the unique boundaries of their domestic market specifically, has never been a wise idea. It could well be that mHealth platforms in China will take the previously mentioned problems, digest them, and use the market’s response to shape a new wave of innovative mHealth technologies. But, for this to happen mHealth apps will need to prove they can remedy essential problems around trust, access, affordability and quality specific to China’s healthcare economy and Chinese healthcare consumers.
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