:: while there are many (MANY) people looking for heathcare, pharmaceutical, and general medical information online in China, the local digital space for these topics it’s largely a mess of fake information and dodgy advertising. Sigh… As such, finding trustworthy information is a real challenge. Fear not though!
Below are a number of different (and real) ways in which patients, family / loved ones, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies / brands, and health care institutions engage and interact online in China around healthcare issues. These are all legit, or if they’re fake, they’re good enough to fool me! Unlikely.
non-medical professional communities ::
The Bingyou website (病友网) is designed to help people share their experiences coping with medical conditions or handling treatments. A general website, it covers a wide range of topics in health care, and its BBS and blog features are oriented toward networking people with similar issues. Other forums provide resources for people with specific conditions, ranging from high-profile issues like diabetes to rarer diseases. These are non-professional websites that are not authorized to dispense medical advice, but they still are able host information, news, and community services. Sweet Home (甜蜜家园) is a portal with information about diabetes, a major healthcare issue in China. It has active forums as well as a blog hosting service. Netizens with diabetes or whose friends or relatives are diabetic discuss lifestyle issues and treatment options, as well as other issues unrelated to healthcare. Blogs range from journals about living with diabetes to tips and advice to the same sort of blogs that can be found on general-interest blog hosts. The BBS has an advertising board where dealers and individuals can post about medial equipment they have for sale. Content is strictly regulated, however, and this site (like most above-board grass-roots communities) does not have much branded advertising. Health-related print media has moved online, too: the magazine Diabetic’s Friend has a similar community website with blogs, forums, and participation from experts and medical professionals. One example of a community for a less-common condition is AS Home (强直性脊柱炎患者之家), a website for sufferers of ankylosing spondylitis that claims to be one of the earliest patient-organized online communities in China.
ask a doctor ::
Good Doctor Web (好大夫网) is a health care portal founded in 2006. Its main objective is to help visitors find good doctors offline (it even has a conspicuous notice at the bottom of every page reminding netizens that online information is no substitute for a face-to-face consultation), and to that end it provides a directory of hospitals and specialists. In addition to basic medical information, Good Doctor Web offers a Q&A service for netizens. For doctors, it provides personalized websites / profiles “to establish an online brand” and interact with patients. The site has a license from the Beijing Health Bureau. It doesn’t run ads, but it has an extensive network of partnerships with hospitals and other healthcare-related websites. Established in 1999, Daifu MD (大夫网) is a healthcare portal that features a large group of physicians who can interact with patients and their families and friends. Daifu MD is connected to the American Pacific Medical Group (美国医疗国际集团), and seems to be in the business of designing websites for hospitals. It has fairly active forums in categories covering all areas of health care. The website is licensed to provide online pharmaceutical information. It does carry ads and has some pharmaceutical brand / company presence, but it is limited to only minor drug brands.
blogs ::
Major blog platforms allow bloggers to be grouped together by interest. Two major health care-related “blog circles” on Sina are Good Doctor (好医生博客圈), which has 978 members, and Nurses’ Home (白衣天使之家), which has 2377 members. Blog posts generally seem to be exchanges between non-doctors about hospitals, treatments, and other health care issues, or educational posts by health care professionals directed at patients and their friends and family. However, unlike the abundance of law-related bloggers and blog providers, the medical profession doesn’t seem to have much conversation taking place on blogs. Orthopedics Community (中国骨科社区) is a specialty website that features blogs run by a good number of orthopedics specialists. It’s clean and up-to-date, unlike a more general affiliated website, Dr. Blog (中国医学博客网), whose lack of focus makes it look less like a community of medical professionals. Perhaps because these blogging communities are intended to build up the image and reputation of individual doctors, pharmaceutical brand / company presence is limited to the institutions the doctors work for, with no other health care or pharmaceutical branding included.
hospital websites ::
Many large hospitals have set up a web presence, and some of them provide interactive and community-building services. Beijing’s Chaoyang Hospital (北京朝阳医院) is a typical example. In addition to an online archive of conditions, tests, and treatments, it has an online Q&A page where visitors can ask questions about hospital procedures or general healthcare-related issues. Hospital staff and netizens can both answer questions. The China Chronic Kidney Disease Net (慢性肾脏病) is an online community associated with the Nephrology Department at Peking University Third Hospital. It has an active BBS in which a number of PKU medical professors participate, running their own sub-boards and responding to questions and comments from members. Blogs by doctors do not seem to have made it to hospital websites yet. As for pharmaceutical brand / company presence, although the unscrupulous off-line promotional practices of smaller, private hospitals have their counterparts online, the websites of major hospitals are generally free of ads and sponsorships, or any kind of commercial cooperation.
pharmaceutical / healthcare brands ::
Health care brands can take advantage of their reputation in certain areas to foster online communities focused on a particular topic. One example is Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Center website (宝宝中心), a combination knowledge-base and interactive community. The site streams instructional videos and has a section where netizens can ask questions of experts. And since everyone loves sharing photos of their baby, netizens who register to post in the Birthday Club forum can be selected to have their baby’s photos featured on the front page. Corporate branding is noticeable but not insistent. Johnson & Johnson also runs the Baby Sleep website which features a podcast that currently has sixteen episodes (宝宝广播站). In the podcasts, known as Baobao Radio, a host and a medical professional discuss various topics that new mothers may need to know. It’s a well-designed Flash app that unfortunately does not seem to be embeddable anywhere other than the Baby Sleep website.
Meiloo
Meiloo (美乐) is a health portal devoted to assisting prospective patients in arranging appointments for dental, cosmetic surgery, weight loss, men’s and women’s health, and therapy issues. It was founded by Zhang Yan, formerly of Random House, and collects detailed information about more than one hundred healthcare centers in Shanghai and Beijing. Pricing information is provided on the website. Healthcare information provided on the site is presented in a sensational, eye-catching manner. Basic rating and response functions are provided so that clinic visitors can share their impressions online with other netizens. There’s an online chat function for netizens who have questions about Meiloo and the healthcare centers it features, but interactivity and community tools are mostly outside the scope of the website.
// AjS
[Friday 5 is the product of my work at Edelman Digital (China). Link here for the full Friday 5 archive. If you'd like to be added to the bilingual (English & Chinese) Friday 5 email distribution list, please send me an email at: adam DOT schokora AT edelman DOT com.]
