When it comes to UnitedHealth, many people think of the myth of 10 times growth in the stock price over ten years. Today, UnitedHealth's market cap has exceeded 2 trillion RMB.

This is inseparable from the development of its health service business. In the past decade, the compound annual growth rate of UnitedHealth's Optum business (health service business) has been close to 20%. By the end of last year, the health service business had accounted for half of UnitedHealth's overall revenue.

In China, there is also a company that is following the development path of UnitedHealth, and that is Ping An Insurance.

In recent years, Ping An has continued to expand its presence in the medical and retirement sectors, and in the 2023 financial report, "medical and retirement" has become a core strategy alongside comprehensive finance. In Ping An Chairman Ma Mingzhe's final vision, Ping An will become users' financial advisor, family doctor, and retirement housekeeper.

Nowadays, Ping An is one step closer to this goal. On June 17th, Ping An officially upgraded its family doctor healthcare service brand "Ping An Family Doctor" and released the "11312" one-stop proactive health management service system. This marks the formal formation of the two core hubs of "family doctors" and "retirement housekeepers" in the management medical system and the synergistic acceleration of medical and retirement and insurance businesses.

At this point, the outline of the Chinese version of UnitedHealth depicted by Ping An's "comprehensive finance + medical and retirement" strategy is becoming clearer.

01 Anchored in the blue ocean of family doctors

Family doctor services provide comprehensive and continuous health services on a household basis. It first appeared in countries and regions such as Western Europe and North America in the 1960s. It was not until the end of the 1980s that the concept of "family doctors" was introduced to China. Currently, "family doctors" are still an emerging health service model in China.

Industry insiders believe that Ping An Health's launch of "Ping An Family Doctor" is not only a high-profile move based on its medical and retirement strategy, but also highlights the imminent emergence of China's long-explored family doctor model.

The reason why Ping An anchors family doctors is precisely because of its in-depth insight into the development of China's medical industry.

With the aggravation of China's aging trend, the health needs of the people have become diversified and complicated. At the same time, domestic medical resources are relatively scarce and unevenly distributed. With the combination of the two, there is a huge demand for convenient and sustainable medical services. According to market research, 80% of users hope to have a family exclusive general practitioner.

In recent years, the state has also issued policies to increase the construction of the family doctor system. The Guidance for Promoting High-Quality Development of Family Doctor Contracting Services issued by the state in 2022 further clarifies the overall development ideas of family doctor contracting services:

The key is to expand the family doctor team, increase service supply, enrich service content, gradually expand service coverage on the basis of ensuring effective fulfillment, and benefit more people. The Guiding Opinion proposes to increase the coverage rate of contracted services by 1 to 3 percentage points per year on the basis of maintaining the existing service level and ensuring service quality, and achieve full coverage of families by 2035.

In addition to the objective market demand and national policy guidance, the development of family doctors is also largely due to Ping An's strategic considerations.

As the flagship of Ping An Group's medical and retirement ecosystem, Ping An Health has always practiced the management medical model. The essence of management medical is to actively manage the health of users, help users get sick less, avoid the aggravation of minor illnesses into serious illnesses, and then control the overall medical expenses and reduce premiums.

According to Guo Xiaotao, Co-CEO of Ping An, Ping An Family Doctor, as the core hub of medical health services, has three roles: doctors, health navigators, and customer managers. Relying on professional family doctor teams, intelligent health records, systematic proactive health management services, and multiple scarce medical resources, it can play an active management role in various stages of the disease before, during, and after diagnosis, and provide "three-to" services of "online, offline, and at home" for users. In other words, family doctors not only link the three major payment parties of finance, enterprise, and individual, but also integrate service resources such as family doctors, specialists, famous doctors, and healthcare, and are the core drivers of the entire chain operation.

With the upgrade of "Ping An Family Doctor", Ping An Health's management medical has formed a dual-core hub of "family doctors" and "retirement housekeepers" to further enhance customer service capability. In the long run, this has also laid a solid foundation for the development of the comprehensive finance + medical and health strategy.

Focus on industry pain points, the three upgrades of Ping An Yijia.

While upgrading "Ping An Family Doctor", Ping An Health also released the "11312" one-stop proactive health management service system.

According to the introduction, the "11312" proactive health management service system consists of a professional family doctor team certified by Peking University Medical International Hospital and the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA), a 5A standard service path guided by the General Practice Branch of the Chinese Medical Association and certified by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), three sets of proactive health management services for sub-healthy population, chronic disease population, and disease population, as well as 12 rare medical resources.

As an emerging service model, the service upgrade of family doctors is not easy. However, Ping An's advantage is that it has long been deeply involved in the medical field, and can fully understand the pain points of the industry and design targeted products and services accordingly.

For example, due to the low popularity of family doctors in China, many people are easily worried about the professionalism of the service. To address this pain point, Ping An Health has put a lot of effort into the professionalism of the service.

Regarding the selection of doctors, all Ping An Family Doctors are physicians above deputy director level, and come from third-class hospitals, with an average of 20 years of work experience. In addition, the doctor team has four authoritative qualifications and service certifications.

In terms of qualification certification, Ping An Family Doctor's team has passed the qualification certification of Peking University International Hospital, and the talent training certification of WONCA, which means that Ping An Family Doctor's training system has been recognized by the largest academic organization of general/family doctors in the world.

In terms of service certification, Ping An Family Doctors have passed the certification of the General Practice Branch of the Chinese Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP). RACGP is the world's leading and Australia's largest organization of general practitioners, and obtaining RACGP certification indicates that the remote service management of family doctors has been recognized by RACGP.

In addition to professionalism, portability is also a major challenge for medical services. Whether enough medical resources can be integrated and portable medical service experience can be provided is also an important criterion for evaluating the quality of family doctor system.

In this regard, Ping An Family Doctor has built an efficient and portable service system based on its huge medical resource network and leading medical technology ability in the industry.

Take the consultation process as an example, users can consult online 24/7 anytime and anywhere, with an average time of 30 seconds to connect, achieving a one-hour medicine delivery service in 271 cities, and compensating for overpriced for more than 300 commonly used drugs.

Overall, by upgrading the professionalism, portability and comprehensiveness of medical services, Ping An Family Doctor not only completely dispels users' doubts about medical services, but also makes the entire service experience more comfortable and reassuring. In the long run, these upgrades targeting industry pain points will be conducive to the landing and penetration of Ping An Family Doctor.

Ping An is moving closer to UnitedHealth.

In Ping An's 2023 financial report, "medical and retirement" has become a core strategy alongside comprehensive finance, marking medical and retirement fields as its future.

To thoroughly solve pain points in user's medical services, Ping An Family Doctor has also upgraded the comprehensiveness of its service. According to the introduction, Ping An Family Doctor's service covers the entire medical service process of buying medicine, registration, accompanying diagnosis, medical treatment, medication and rehabilitation. For example, in the registration process, Ping An Family Doctor helps users make appointments with hospitals and departments, and provides users with medical cards, greatly improving the efficiency of offline medical treatment.

In general, by upgrading the professionalism, portability, and comprehensiveness of medical services, Ping An Family Doctor not only disposes of the user's medical service distress but also makes the entire service experience more comfortable and reassuring. It's a long-term strategy to push for Ping An Family Doctor's development and penetration.

Ping An is moving closer to UnitedHealth.

Chairman Ma Mingzhe of Ping An has said that medical care is Ping An's future, but today, when we try to understand Ping An's value, the layout and business performance of medical and retirement fields are becoming a true present. In Ping An's 2023 financial report, "medical and retirement" has become a core strategy alongside comprehensive finance.

Speaking of Ping An's layout in the medical industry, it's hard not to think of UnitedHealth. Over the past few decades, UnitedHealth's performance has continued to grow thanks to its unique model: integrating insurance and medical services, with insurance business directing the flow of medical services, and medical services participating in users' health management, helping insurance business control costs and forming a virtuous cycle.

A relevant person in charge of Ping An Life shared the following data: In 2023, the number of customers of Ping An Life who used health management services exceeded 20 million, and as an example of critical illness protection, the amount of critical illness claims reached 22.1 billion yuan in 2023, while the customers who used the critical illness plan increased by more than twice. By 2023, Ping An Life customers have cumulatively used medical and health services more than 80 million times, their loyalty has further increased, and the premium retention rate for customers who use the service has increased by 1 percentage point compared to those who do not use it. The coverage rate of customers using health management services in 2023 is 3.9 times higher than that of customers who do not use the service.

This is a change in the business model for Ping An's insurance business, from traditional low-frequency policy services to higher-frequency and proactive health services, which not only enhances the competitiveness of products, but also promotes high-quality transformation of the sales team.

According to Ma Mingzhe, chairman of Ping An, Ping An wants to become a professional financial advisor for users, a family doctor, and a retirement housekeeper, the latter two of which are highly unified and both belong to medical and retirement business.

Today, such an idea is becoming a reality. In addition to upgrading family doctors, retirement housekeepers are another innovative move for Ping An Health in the field of home-based retirement. Through the three-in-one service of intelligent housekeeper, life housekeeper and doctor housekeeper, Ping An housekeeper provides all-round services for the elderly at home in the three major scenes of good doctor, good living and good play.

Among them, in the four aspects of medical care, housing, leisure, and nursing, Ping An of China has joined forces with industry experts and leading companies to jointly formulate service standards, build and upgrade product systems, in order to solve the pain points of the lack of standards, lack of quality, and uneven quality in the field of retirement services.

Thus, Ping An has formed a dual-core hub of "family doctors" and "retirement housekeepers" in the field of medical and retirement, and through multi-scene and full-process coverage, insurance and home-based retirement are closely integrated, achieving mutual empowerment. That is to say, for Ping An, medical and retirement is no longer a future concept, but a time to play a real role.

On the one hand, as a differentiated advantage of Ping An's medical and retirement business, it is closely working with the financial business and becoming an important means for agents to serve customers, jointly serving the huge individual user market and enterprise customer resources.

On the other hand, Ping An is also constantly innovating and creating medical and retirement service products in multiple scenarios and forms. These products not only meet users' diversified health needs, but also provide strong support for the main business in terms of customer acquisition, retention, and customer size, promoting the high-quality development of the main business.

From the current perspective, the synergy between medical and retirement and insurance business is becoming stronger. According to Guo Xiaotao, co-CEO of Ping An, the company has noticed that the functions of insurance are gradually changing from traditional single financial functions, such as wealth management, wealth preservation and appreciation, health protection, etc., to "insurance+" services. Customer demand for medical, health services, and retirement is increasing day by day, so the combination of medical, health, and retirement with the insurance industry will become closer and closer.

In terms of data, as of the end of March 2024, more than 63% of Ping An's nearly 234 million individual customers simultaneously used services provided by the medical and retirement ecosystem, with an average of about 3.37 contracts per customer and an average AUM of 57,600 yuan, which is 1.6 times and 3.6 times respectively of those without using the medical and retirement ecosystem services.

In the past, many people said that the road of China UnitedHealth was difficult, and when evaluating medical businesses, they often said that this is a very "heavy" business, difficult to do, and not sexy, but a physical law has always been overlooked: the greater the quality, the greater the inertia. At least from the current progress, the market may have more expectations for this grand reform.