YIDU TECH, a leading domestic AI healthcare company, has drawn significant market attention due to its deep focus in the medical artificial intelligence field, particularly following the launch of its evidence-based AI assistant for doctors, "Yidu Smart Follow." At an investor exchange held on April 9th, YIDU TECH's Co-Founder and CEO Xu Jiming, alongside CFO Feng Xiaoying, provided direct and insightful responses to dozens of investment institutions and nearly a hundred investors regarding the product's core value, differentiated competitive strategy, commercialization timeline, and future strategic blueprint, systematically addressing the market's key concerns.
When asked about YIDU TECH's differentiated advantages compared to existing medical AI products, Xu Jiming clarified that the company is not simply chasing trends in general-purpose large language models but is deeply rooted in the essence of healthcare, focusing on building "Physical AI." He emphasized that the core of medical AI lies in modeling disease progression and patient status, fundamentally driven by data to create digital twins. YIDU TECH's core competitiveness stems from years of deep engagement within hospital settings, accumulating high-quality, specialized disease datasets and evidence-based logic. Unlike strategies from large internet companies that focus on lightweight services like appointment booking and initial consultations, YIDU TECH's products integrate deeply into physicians' actual workflows, addressing core pain points such as information overload, fragmented data, and delayed updates to medical guidelines. Xu Jiming believes the key to successful industry implementation is solid foundational development, not merely technological concepts. Accordingly, "Yidu Smart Follow" is positioned to act as a physician's "super assistant," "second brain," and "multidisciplinary think tank," with its value ultimately validated through professional medical judgment and real-world clinical application.
Addressing market concerns about the pace of commercialization, Xu Jiming outlined a clear, multi-tiered strategy, demonstrating mature thinking about revenue models. He explained that "Yidu Smart Follow" will adopt a dual-track approach with "Hospital Edition" and "Individual Edition" versions. The Hospital Edition targets hospitals, continuing traditional software procurement models like project-based sales. The Individual Edition for doctors will follow a "basic features free, high-computation/high-value scenarios paid" model, with specific business models involving partnerships with pharmaceutical companies for evidence-based medical promotion using AI. Acknowledging that Chinese doctors have limited willingness to pay directly, Xu Jiming pointed to high-value promotion of novel specialty drugs and intelligent patient journey management as currently validated effective paths. He stressed that traditional pharma promotion models are becoming obsolete, creating a replacement opportunity for evidence-based medical AI solutions. Xu Jiming cited the company's life sciences business as an example of strong growth, revealing that its intelligent clinical trial management platform is already deployed in over 100 qualified hospitals in China, with new orders for this segment growing 60% year-over-year, indicating significant market recovery and demand. Concurrently, the hospital edition AI product has been deployed in over 50 hospitals, laying a solid foundation for broader rollout.
Regarding the challenges of generalization and reliability for large models in serious medical scenarios, Xu Jiming shared YIDU TECH's unique technical approach: multi-agent collaboration. Instead of relying on a single general-purpose model, the company employs a cluster of multi-disciplinary agents deeply trained in specific domains. This approach aligns with the logic of multi-disciplinary team consultations in clinical practice, gaining expert acceptance while effectively mitigating current technical limitations of large models. The company has provided agent development tools to doctors, using a no-code platform to make decades of implicit clinical experience explicit. Xu Jiming views this doctor-led, rather than purely technology-driven, approach as crucial for medical AI implementation. At the application level, he noted that AI diagnostic capabilities in specific areas like oncology have reached the level of senior consultants, but the transfer of medical decision-making authority must be handled with extreme caution. Therefore, the strategy prioritizes collaboration with top-tier tertiary specialized hospitals, using their data and scenarios to incubate high-quality applications before radiating outwards to primary care institutions through medical consortiums, rather than pursuing blanket coverage.
Looking ahead, Xu Jiming believes the true native, long-tail applications for medical AI will emerge on the patient side. The integration of wearable devices and AI to create patient digital twins will partially shift future medical decision-making power to patients, enabling truly proactive health management. While acknowledging the overall conservatism of the healthcare system, he highlighted that policy support for primary care AI and hospitals' inherent need for cost reduction and efficiency gains create an excellent window of opportunity for pragmatic players like YIDU TECH.
From a financial perspective, CFO Feng Xiaoying expressed confidence, stating that after two years of strategic adjustment, the company has divested some non-core businesses less related to AI, allowing its core capabilities to solidify. The company's profitability has improved significantly, with strong growth in new orders, providing substantial confidence in an upcoming inflection point for growth.
The investor exchange conveyed a clear message from YIDU TECH: in the long race of medical AI, the company is not pursuing short-term trends but is building a durable competitive moat through robust data governance capabilities, deep industry understanding, and a pragmatic commercialization path.
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