According to a recent approval published on the official website of the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, ByteDance has been granted permission to build a new hospital in the Zhongguancun Chaoyang Park North Area medical service plot (Plot 2905-0006) in Chaoyang District in Beijing. The hospital, tentatively named Beijing Aierui Hospital, will be a 800-bed, third-tier comprehensive Sino-foreign joint venture profit-making hospital. It is the third phase of the Aierui Oncology Hospital, which ByteDance acquired as part of the Mei Zhong Yihé group.
Mei Zhong Yihé, a high-end women’s and children’s specialty hospital, has been actively transitioning to a comprehensive medical platform in recent years. In April 2024, its founder and CEO, Hu Lan, announced the completion of this transition. The new third phase of Aierui Hospital is expected to further upgrade the facility into a full-fledged comprehensive hospital.
ByteDance, which entered the healthcare sector later than other internet giants, has shown significant investment in physical hospitals. It has successively acquired institutions such as Songguo Clinic and Mei Zhong Yihé. However, over the past few years, ByteDance’s healthcare team has undergone adjustments. The business of Xiaohe Health was merged into Douyin, and Baike Mingyi Network ceased operations. The only remaining active healthcare initiative in the public eye has been Douyin’s foray into the pharmaceutical e-commerce sector.
Underneath the surface, ByteDance has been quietly expanding its physical hospital layout. Just before the approval for Beijing Aierui Hospital, ByteDance invested 734 million yuan to establish “Beijing Ninghe Kangrui Medical Management Co., Ltd.” The company’s business scope includes disability rehabilitation training services, non-residential real estate leasing, and property management, among others. Mei Zhong Yihé clarified that this is not a new business but was established to meet the operational needs of the group’s medical services.
A Big Move into Private Hospitals
ByteDance began its concentrated efforts in healthcare in 2020. In May, it acquired Baike Mingyi Network, a leading professional mmedical popularization knowledge platform that had been established for a decade and was the designated website for the “National Health Commission’s Authoritative Medical Popularization Project.” In August, ByteDance acquired the internet medical company Yiling Er Si, founded by former Baidu Vice President Wu Haifeng and former Baidu Executive Director Sun Wenyu after they left Baidu. After the acquisition, Wu Haifeng joined ByteDance and established the Aurora Department, which is directly responsible for health business and reports to Zhang Yiming. The “Xiaohe Health” brand was launched under Wu Haifeng’s leadership, creating an online medical service product matrix.
With these two acquisitions, ByteDance completed its online medical layout from scratch within just six months. Subsequently, ByteDance began to gradually build its offline medical map. The earliest layout was through the acquisition of Yiling Er Si to achieve 100% control of Songguo Clinic. This is a high-end modern comprehensive medical institution with the characteristics of “large specialties and small comprehensiveness,” integrating medical, preventive, and health management services online and offline. The main service functions focus on internal medicine, surgery, gynecology, general practice, stomatology, dermatology, traditional Chinese medicine, and health management. After being incorporated into ByteDance, Songguo Clinic was renamed Xiaohe Clinic and became part of the Xiaohe Health brand.
In addition, ByteDance spent billions of yuan to acquire the high-end women’s and children’s specialty hospital Mei Zhong Yihé. In recent years, Mei Zhong Yihé has been actively transitioning to a comprehensive hospital. In May 2015, the first comprehensive medical service institution of Mei Zhong Yihé, the Beijing Mei Zhong Yihé Comprehensive Outpatient Center, began operations. In 2017, Mei Zhong Yihé began to prepare for the oncology specialty hospital Mei Zhong Aierui and officially launched it in 2021. Although the operation time is short, the business progress is very fast. According to the “2023 Beijing Area Medical Service and Key Specialty Evaluation Report” compiled by the Beijing Municipal Health Commission and the Beijing Municipal Health Big Data and Policy Research Center, Beijing Mei Zhong Aierui Tumor Hospital ranks third in the comprehensive ranking.
In April 2024, founder and CEO Hu Lan announced that the group had completed the transition from women’s and children’s specialty medical services to a comprehensive medical platform. At the end of December 2024, the third-level Sino-foreign joint venture hospital of Mei Zhong Yihé was officially put into use. The transition from women’s and children’s hospitals to comprehensive hospitals will introduce MDT (multi-disciplinary diagnosis and treatment) and international cooperation into more disciplines.
However, before ByteDance could fully integrate its online and offline medical resources, the situation took a turn for the worse. In early 2023, multiple media outlets reported that the Xiaohe Health team was facing adjustments, with its business being merged into Douyin. Wu Haifeng was transferred to head Douyin’s search function. In early 2024, Baike Mingyi Network ceased operations. The chain of “science popularization videos + traffic diversion to Xiaohe Health + online consultation + medicine sales” failed to materialize. For a long time afterward, the only active healthcare initiative in ByteDance’s public eye was its pharmaceutical e-commerce business on Douyin. It wasn’t until early January of this year, when ByteDance invested 734 million yuan to establish “Beijing Ninghe Kangrui Medical Management Co., Ltd.” and began construction of the third phase of Mei Zhong Aierui Hospital, that its physical hospital layout re-entered the public view.
Transition from Specialty to Comprehensive Hospital
The transition from women’s and children’s specialty hospitals to comprehensive hospitals is almost inevitable in the current environment. With the decline in birth rates, public hospitals’ obstetrics departments have occasionally shut down in recent years, and private hospitals focusing on obstetrics and pediatrics have also been affected by fluctuations in medical demand. Another high-end private hospital in China, United Family Healthcare, began transitioning from a women’s and children’s specialty hospital to a comprehensive hospital more than a decade ago, gradually adding multiple departments such as oncology, cardiology, and orthopedics. By 2016, 60% of Beijing United Family Healthcare’s operating income came from cardiology, neurosurgery, orthopedics, and other fields. Neurological rehabilitation, as the hospital’s advantageous recovery project, accounted for nearly one-third of the revenue.
Aierui, as the oncology specialty hospital under Mei Zhong Yihé, also follows the path of transitioning from a specialty hospital to a comprehensive hospital. The newly built third phase of Aierui will be upgraded to a comprehensive hospital. “Taking the high-tech route is the way out for private medical 3.0,” said Xu Zhonghuang. “We have launched Sino-foreign diagnosis and treatment centers and established cell therapy centers in cooperation with Singapore. These are not the usual things for private hospitals.”
Jing Xiu Jing, vice president of the Private Hospital Branch of the Chinese Hospital Association and president of the Social Medical Branch of the Sichuan Hospital Association, previously told “Health News Consulting” in an interview, “The country strongly encourages social medical practice, with the aim of hoping that private hospitals will become a supplement to the country’s basic medical services. Private hospitals need to find the right positioning and choose the right track to achieve further development.”
Jing Xiu Jing believes that given the current medical supply and demand situation in China, medical institutions have basically saturated. Under the current vigorous development of county-level medical services, medical communities, and medical alliances, the survival situation of social medical institutions will become more difficult, especially for large comprehensive private medical institutions. At that time, Jing Xiu Jing pointed out that in the gap between medical insurance cost control and the expansion of public hospitals, moving towards high-end medical services and specialties might be the best positioning and way out for private hospitals.
ByteDance, however, has chosen the opposite path, transitioning from a specialty hospital to a comprehensive hospital. At the 18th-anniversary exchange meeting of Mei Zhong Yihé in April 2024, Hu Lan said that ByteDance did not interfere much in the operation of Mei Zhong Yihé, which still maintains independent and autonomous operation. In terms of collaboration, although ByteDance focuses on online medical services, Mei Zhong Yihé still emphasizes offline medical services. Whether the group’s doctors join Xiaohe Health is entirely up to individual choice. In addition, Mei Zhong Yihé may build an internet hospital platform in 2025.
After spending billions of yuan to acquire Mei Zhong Yihé, this physical hospital has not yet deeply connected with ByteDance’s own medical business. In the future long-term layout, how will ByteDance integrate its online and offline medical resources to create a closed loop of internet medical services? How far can it go on the path of private medical services? These questions still need time to verify.
