Health management robots have arrived, and the big domestic medical and health AI model has welcomed new samples.

According to reports, on April 15 of this year, Meinian Health's new AI application product, “Health Xiaomei” Digital Intelligence Health Manager, began internal trial operation. According to official sources, this is the first AI robot for health management in China.

Through this product, users can generate a health management plan adapted to their own with one click after uploading information such as personal lifestyle habits and exercise conditions; they can also obtain exclusive medical examinations and prevention plans based on personal health data, lifestyle habits, family medical history, etc.

Simply put, using “Health Xiaomei” is equivalent to having a gold medal personal health consultant who is online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and lasts a lifetime.

Earlier, in January of this year, American Health, HUAWEI CLOUD, and Runda Healthcare announced cooperation to create a “healthy and small beauty.” Since then, American Health and Runda Medical have successively experienced excessive ups and downs. Meanwhile, at the Nvidia 2024 GTC conference on March 18, CEO Huang Renxun certified that “AI healthcare” will become the next golden track, setting off another wave of rise and fall in concept stocks in A-shares.

In fact, “AI+ Healthcare” has remained popular in the A-share market since 2024. This year coincides with the 20th anniversary of the establishment of American Health. Under the new “All in AI” strategy, “Healthy Little Beauty” is not only a gift for its 20th anniversary, but also a benchmark product for building a new AIGC journey to create a new paradigm for digital health management in the big model era.

20A new starting point for the year, “All in AI”

Three years ago, American Health proposed an “All in Digital” strategy, and by 2024, it had upgraded to “All in AI” — striving to upgrade from a leading company on the preventive medical circuit to a leader in comprehensive full-life digital health management. Among these, the development and launch of “Health and Beauty” is an important part.

This product is not limited to providing users with personalized medical examinations, health management plans, and predicting potential health problems and providing solutions through technology such as big data analysis and digital twins; it can also assist doctors in diagnosing diseases and improve diagnosis efficiency; at the same time, it will also continue to pay attention to and introduce advanced health technology, such as wearable devices, non-invasive testing technology, etc., to apply it to health management to improve the technological content and humanistic care of the service.

The launch of “Healthy Little Beauty” can be seen as a key point in Mei Nian Health's “All in AI” strategy. Looking back at its 20-year development process, it can be seen that its construction of the AIGC model was anchored at the beginning of the transformation.

Meinian Health was founded in 2004. From its establishment until 2018, it focused on infrastructure network construction and market education, and completed full coverage of mainland China in 2018. It established a matrix of four major brands, “Mei Nian Health,” “Ci Ming,” “Oya,” and “Meizhao,” and realized the transformation of the business model from a traditional single to a multi-level health management system.

Also around 2018, American Health began using big data and artificial intelligence technology to develop and innovate in the field of early disease screening, relying on quality and data to simultaneously upgrade products and medical quality. For example, in 2017, it already launched AI-assisted diagnostic applications for pulmonary nodules. In the following years, it has successively launched applications such as fundus AI and breast ultrasound AI to help with accurate screening, reduce the rate of missed diagnoses, and improve the quality of medical examinations.

By 2020, American Health proposed the establishment of a full-life cycle health management system, from medical examination and diagnosis to a closed-loop transformation of services before, during, and after the examination. In other words, American Health has expanded its market space from a relatively single physical examination scenario to a full health scenario covering the entire life cycle before, during, and after the examination.

In this transformation from a medical examination leader to a full-process health service leader, the launch of the Bian Que Intelligent Medical Examination Management System is critical.

In 2022, Meinian Health officially launched the Bian Que Intelligent Medical Examination Management SAAS Cloud Platform. The platform can implement functions such as timesharing appointments, quick registration, smart diagnosis, real-time data exchange, sample tracking, and automatic reporting of abnormal test results, etc., to comprehensively improve medical quality, customer experience, in-hospital efficiency, and branch management.

In 2023, the Bian Que system was widely implemented at Meinian Health's more than 600 medical examination centers across the country, greatly improving operational efficiency and customer experience.

If you compare American Health to a very large airport, then the Bian Magpie system can be graphically viewed as the “brain center” tower of the airport. The daily operation of each terminal, flight scheduling, and the orderly queuing and take-off of hundreds of aircrafts all need to rely on the tower's scientific command. With the support of artificial intelligence, the “tower” Bian Qua does not require human control of the field, and can rely on an AI system to automatically execute instructions such as appointments, registration, and medical guidance.

For American Health itself, transforming health management throughout the life cycle will inevitably lead to an increase in business volume and an increase in operating load. The Bian Magpie system has laid the foundation for it to take on the multiplier increase in the number of tasks.

At the same time, the Bian Magpie system is also an important vehicle for the digital transformation of American Health. AI products that help medical diagnosis and health management, such as “Health and Beauty”, which the latter has launched one after another, have all been launched within this platform to serve a wide range of users.

Looking at the entire industry, the big model is becoming a strategic opportunity to drive economic growth, and the medical industry has ushered in an inflection point of AI-driven transformation. On the other hand, public hospital resources tend to be saturated, and the expansion of the health examination market and the increase in the share of non-public medical examinations are long-term trends.

Therefore, the entire healthcare industry is currently also looking forward to the emergence of samples that successfully use AI technology to improve diagnosis and treatment efficiency and benefit the entire population.

American Health may be expected to provide a model to refer to — when announcing cooperation with HUAWEI CLOUD and Runda Medical, it stated that “Health Xiaomei” will gradually be promoted and applied to more than 600 medical examination centers under the Group, which will help promote the popularization of “digital intelligence medicine” within the Meinian system and accelerate the achievement of high-quality medical resources for all.

A.I.“Star lineup” focuses on the 3 trillion dollar market

In 2022, American Health proposed the strategic goal of “building a new American year in three years”. Digitalization is a key move. 2024 is both the 20th anniversary of the establishment of American Health and the end of the three-year strategic goal.

With the three-year goal in mind, American Health has also accelerated the pace of digital transformation in recent years.

In January of this year, “Health and Beauty”, which it co-created with HUAWEI CLOUD and Runda Medical, was quickly launched after three months; the 12th China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition AIGC Healthcare Professional Competition, which it participated in hosting, also ended in January. By participating in this competition, American Health was able to select innovative projects in the field of AIGC and big models on merit, and launch more AI products in cooperation with outstanding entrepreneurial teams and participating teams.

Earlier, Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, pointed out in his book the challenges big models face in the medical health field. The key to opening up technology development to application implementation is that the technical team can obtain a sufficiently rich medical and health-related corpus and data set, and can test and optimize in a real business environment.

At the beginning of 2024, the National Data Administration issued a three-year action plan to implement “Data Element ×”, which also listed health care as a key area of the “Data Element ×” plan. It is hoped that by activating the potential of data elements, the value of personal health care data will be released in an orderly manner.

As a leading company in the field of preventive medicine in China, Meinian Health has built a huge treasure trove of personal health data covering sociodemography, health history, lifestyle, physical examinations, laboratory tests, and imaging tests. This has provided a data foundation for the big model to be implemented in the healthcare industry, and has also become a key entry point for users to achieve accurate personalized prevention strategies for chronic disease management.

Currently, there are nearly 30 million users who perform medical examinations and receive health care services on the American Health Platform every year. At the same time, it also has more than 60,000 professional medical and management personnel. Having been deeply involved in healthcare for 20 years, this part of the data and scenarios has become an advantageous resource for Meinian Health to participate in the development of major medical models.

Furthermore, based on the full life cycle transformation that began in 2020, the business currently launched by American Health covers the entire process before, during, and after inspection. This also provides a comprehensive training scenario for testing and optimization of its large model applications after implementation.

Looking at the timeline, since the three-year target was proposed, “AI” has always been the primary label for American health innovation products. The above resource advantages have also helped it launch a number of “AI single products” before, such as pulmonary stenosis, brain intelligence, AI coronary calcification points testing programs, and the AI-MDT multi-disciplinary expert intelligent health management system.

For example, the lung health screening product “pulmonary stenosis” combines seven types of lung cancer autoantibody hematological tests, imaging e+ in-depth analysis reports of retrospective pulmonary nodules, pulmonary health service packages, and pulmonary malignant tumor insurance, which enables full closed-loop management of pulmonary nodules.

This means that “pulmonary tuberculosis” has established a full-chain in-depth lung health risk protection system for customers, from early screening of pulmonary nodules to early diagnosis of pulmonary nodules, follow-up management, lung cancer diagnosis and treatment intervention, and healthy lifestyle shaping, and in line with clinical standards.

Reflected in diagnostic efficiency, in 2022, for pulmonary nodules discovered through low-dose spiral CT tests, the results showed that the pulmonary nodule detection rate was as high as 55.9% for 9.17 million medical examiners included in the sample analysis. This highlights the important role of “pulmonary stenosis” in the early detection and treatment of pulmonary nodules. Through this comprehensive lung health risk protection system, early prevention and treatment of lung cancer can be promoted more effectively, and the health burden and economic costs caused by advanced lung cancer can be reduced.

Another example is “Brain Smart”, which is an innovative product focusing on early screening for stroke and Alzheimer's disease. It uses image AI analysis technology and a complete brain standard database for healthy Chinese people of all ages to identify structural abnormalities and functional degradation in the early stages of brain disease.

The product also focuses on the user's post-inspection experience, providing users with a comprehensive, full-process closed-loop service.

According to American Health, this product is the first multi-dimensional intelligent brain health risk assessment product in the country.

At the application level, by the end of last year, “Brain Ruijia” had established more than 400 branches in more than 200 cities across the country. The number of brain health tests completed in 2023 was over 100,000. The detection rate of medium- and high-risk abnormalities reached 14.14%. There was a clear trend of brain health risk rejuvenation. 18.90% of brain structural abnormalities were detected under 50, 3.24% for memory-related hippocampal abnormalities, and 27.71% of brain white matter high signal abnormalities related to brain aging were detected.

These innovative products not only improve diagnostic efficiency and customer experience, but also reflect Mei Nian Health's unique technology label.

The help that AI can bring to medical progress has long been verified by various applications. In the early screening stage of the disease, AI can identify minor abnormal changes by analyzing large amounts of image data to achieve early detection and prevention of the disease; in the diagnosis stage, based on deep learning of massive image data, AI can help doctors discover the subtle characteristics of the lesion and improve the accuracy of diagnosis.

This is also further driving the rapid development of AI medicine. Relevant market statistics show that by 2025, the domestic AI medical imaging market may reach 44.2 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 135%. According to iResearch's forecast, by 2028, the overall health management market will exceed 300 billion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 12.5% between 2023-2028.

In other words, the industry where American Health is located will usher in an incremental market of 3 trillion yuan in less than five years.

Reflected on the performance side, American Health's 2023 performance forecast shows that the company's revenue last year was about 10.73 billion yuan to 11.05 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate of about 25.75% to 29.50%. The company's net profit to mother reversed losses. The profit was about 460 million yuan to 570 million yuan, an increase of about 2 times over the previous year.

A report by Huaan Securities mentioned that American Health's success in reversal of losses in 2023 was due to the company's adherence to digital operation and quality drive, enhanced medical quality through digital informatization, continuous improvement of the medical quality system, and high service efficiency and customer experience satisfaction.

Alpha and beta market coexist

Prior to that, the capital market's concerns about American health were mainly due to operating losses, and the company's stock price also experienced several declines and climbs over a long period of time.

However, judging from the profit curve, usually traditional industries are in the early stages of digital transformation, and capital investment is difficult to immediately present on the profit side; they all require a certain return cycle. Subsequently, along with the gradual increase in business volume and the release of scale effects, upfront costs were continuously diluted, and profits often showed a gradual increase in profits.

The latest performance forecast for 2023 reverses profit losses, or indicates that American Health is currently entering the harvest period. However, looking at its valuation, it is currently still at a relatively low point in history, so there may still be room for imagination in future valuations.

At the same time, through the operation of the entire company since the digital transformation, it is also possible to find initial results in the refined management of American Health, and future profitability is expected to continue to be realized.

According to the Huaan Securities report, the medical examination industry has recovered strongly since the end of the epidemic. Demand for medical examinations, especially for special examinations for basic chronic diseases and high-end health management, has continued to expand. American Health continues to explore the middle and high-end customer market and enter a healthy development channel where volume and price have risen sharply.

Furthermore, the collaborative development of the American Health Group's personal inspection business system has successfully unleashed the potential for collaborative revenue growth between group package business and individual inspection business through the establishment of a closed-loop marketing system and strengthening the leadership of government and enterprise customers. Continued exploration of innovative businesses has also created differentiated products for them.

Meanwhile, cooperating with Runda Healthcare and HUAWEI CLOUD to build an AI robot for health management is believed by Huaan Securities to open up a new performance growth curve for American Health.

Moving beyond an internal corporate perspective and focusing on the industry, since the beginning of 2024, the “Report on the Work of the Government” first mentioned the “Artificial Intelligence +” initiative, which means that China is strengthening top-level design and speeding up the formation of new quality productivity driven by artificial intelligence; in the secondary market, “AI+ healthcare” frequently attracts attention. Mainstream institutional views also believe that AI+ healthcare is expected to lead the medical industry into a new era of development, and is optimistic about the beneficial assets of aging in the medium to long term.

American Health's timely upgrade strategy announced “All in AI”, which is in line with the industry's development pulse. At the same time, it has benefited from early layout and established its own first-mover advantage.

Especially after the epidemic, demand for medical examinations recovered as scheduled, some small medical examination companies withdrew from the market, and the competitive pattern was optimized. According to Galaxy Securities, the industry has entered a virtuous cycle of relying on quality improvement to drive price increases. Standing at a new starting point on the 20th anniversary, American Health is expected to usher in a growth window where alpha and beta opportunities coexist.