Foreword
More than 100 years ago, economist Schumpeter used economic models to explain that companies that innovate successfully can escape the trap of declining profits and achieve sustained development, while companies that cannot successfully recombine production factors are often the first to be eliminated by the market.
In other words, innovation is fundamental to business survival and growth.
In healthcare, digital transformation has clearly become a major trend. Profiling, tagging, visualized charts, and a 4 million-HCP profile library refreshed daily are becoming part of the industry's new normal.
As a high-tech enterprise, MeDomino structures massive data from both the physician and patient sides, empowering the daily work of pharmaceutical companies across R&D, marketing, sales, and other departments. Through data insight and intelligent analysis, it forms management recommendations and builds enterprise-level, measurable closed-loop healthcare management for customers.
01
In 2021, demand in the healthcare industry grew rapidly and moved toward greater refinement, professionalism, and intelligence. People increasingly wanted convenient medical consultation and medication-purchase experiences, as well as personalized disease prevention and treatment plans, giving rise to many innovative digital healthcare products and service models.
As a leader in the healthcare big data segment, MeDomino has built a 4 million-HCP profile library and maintains partnerships with 85% of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies. Yet the company's journey has not been free of difficulties. Speaking about the earliest days of entrepreneurship, MeDomino founder Lu Wenqing told the Beijing Equity Exchange: "At the hardest time, I would even wake up in the middle of the night and count on my fingers how long the company could survive. Fortunately, all that persistence and effort were not wasted."
Lu Wenqing graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he studied biology, and later worked at the National Medical Products Administration on quality standards for imported medicines. After three years of work, driven by self-transcendence and a passion for innovation, he chose to continue his studies at the National University of Singapore. After graduating, he decisively stepped away from basic biology research, chose the path of healthcare big data, and joined IMS Health, a leading healthcare consulting company. During his work, Lu gradually discovered a large information gap between patients and doctors, which planted the seed for entrepreneurship. He found that many patients had limited awareness of certain pharmaceutical products, making it difficult for them to choose the most scientific treatment plan when seeking effective care.
Lu gave an example: if a pharmaceutical company developed a specific medicine for treating thalassemia, but doctors and patients did not learn about it in time, most patients might continue traditional blood transfusion treatments, creating many problems.
In 2016, to better use healthcare big data to promote innovation in the pharmaceutical industry, Lu Wenqing founded MeDomino and officially began his entrepreneurial journey. He told the Beijing Equity Exchange: "The original idea was to use technical tools to improve industry efficiency faster, so more people could understand that certain medical products exist, truly meet patient needs, and solve the problems they face." Unlike many other industries, however, market recognition and customer acceptance were key challenges in healthcare data.
At the beginning, the team was short on talent, technology had to be outsourced, funding was difficult, and market recognition was low. Problems arrived one after another. In addition, MeDomino's product direction was ahead of market demand at the time, making it extremely hard to find like-minded partners who understood the product. Capital investment produced no immediate return, which became a major pain point for the company.
Recalling the signing of the first order, Lu said: "It was quite interesting. We happened to have known a client for some time and knew that he was willing to learn about new things, so we explained some of our ideas and plans to him. He actually thought it made sense and that it was exactly what was needed at that stage." That first order undoubtedly gave Lu much greater confidence during the entrepreneurial process.
"For now, the direction we are taking is the right one," Lu told the Beijing Equity Exchange.
In 2019, MeDomino's revenue grew nearly 300% year over year. In 2021, it was officially recognized as a national high-tech enterprise. MeDomino's R&D center is currently located in Beijing, with its market delivery center in Shanghai.
02
"Seeing a doctor can feel like joining the Spring Festival travel rush." This is not a joke; it is reality.
More and more healthcare startups are focusing on building bridges between doctors and patients, accelerating digital transformation, enabling "zero-second" information delivery, and creating "zero-distance" doctor-patient communication. Innovation-driven development has become an unmistakable trend. MeDomino is no exception. With early insight into the trend and an early start, MeDomino has remained at the forefront of the field and was named a digital innovation model in 2021.
Lu Wenqing told the Beijing Equity Exchange: "In recent years, we have remained focused on innovation and have solved practical digital problems for many customers. For example, our coverage among the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies has reached 85%. At the same time, MeDomino also serves many local innovative pharmaceutical companies, such as BeiGene, Hutchison Whampoa, and Hansoh Pharma. We hope to cooperate more with local innovative pharmaceutical companies." Since its founding, MeDomino has been innovation-oriented, approaching the industry from a unique perspective and independently developing a full set of physician and patient profiling insight systems through substantial R&D investment.
According to the official website, MeDomino's main products include HCP Navigator and physician data integration solutions. Its HCP360 all-dimensional profile and tagging system, for example, covers HCP belief analysis, physician personal beliefs, and belief tags segmented down to drivers and concerns. It is like an identity card for doctors, making clinic hours, treatment plans, drug familiarity, patient types, and many other kinds of information clear at a glance. In addition to doctor identity insight, MeDomino also has a patient insight system. By setting up modules such as profiles, motivations, key pain points, and action recommendations, it helps pharmaceutical companies understand what type of patients they are, which channels they appear in, what their needs are, and which products can better improve their disease status.
For example, among older adults, what symptoms or comorbidities are appearing? What is the level of blood pressure control? What follow-up plans and recommendations are needed for continuing medication, changing medication, or stopping medication? Once these needs are clearly understood, companies can address them precisely. Lu Wenqing explained: "MeDomino has also developed highly complex algorithms, including a series of artificial intelligence models, to deeply mine massive amounts of data. R&D and technical personnel currently account for one third of the company, bringing together many R&D talents from top universities. MeDomino is probably one of the companies in the industry with the highest share of investment in R&D and artificial intelligence."
Massive data has become the fuel for algorithms. Combined with deep insight into industry needs, MeDomino developed MeDomino Content Hub, one of the industry's most advanced content management platforms and the only content management platform in the industry with proven successful experience. Healthcare companies have large volumes of content in complex formats, scattered across departments, difficult to access across teams, difficult to search, and nearly impossible to reuse. This leads to low content utilization, repeated content creation, low efficiency, and serious waste. Using MeDomino's massive data, MeDomino Content Hub trains industry-leading natural language processing models, completes automated tagging of multi-modal content, and provides standardized tagging and continuous operations, laying the foundation for effective integration, full utilization, and cross-department sharing of content.
"Patient-centricity" has always been MeDomino's principle. In March 2022, MeDomino joined the China Nonprescription Medicines Association and Reckitt Benckiser Guilong Pharmaceutical to release the Gen Z Throat Health Blue Book, promoting public education on throat health. The report used bar charts, fan charts, and other formats to detail the age distribution of people with throat symptoms and data related to pharyngitis keywords.
More importantly, unlike traditional questionnaire surveys, the Blue Book used massive public online data and applied artificial intelligence processing to more than one million data points, presenting the current state of Gen Z throat health from multiple dimensions and perspectives.
Lu Wenqing told the Beijing Equity Exchange: "We often see many real examples where mild symptoms are delayed until they become severe. Early intervention and early treatment are actually better. We hope the Blue Book can help awaken people's attention to pharyngitis."
03
When people talk about digitalization, one word inevitably comes to mind: data.
With the spread of digital applications such as mobile healthcare and AI medical imaging, healthcare data leaks have become common, and violations involving privacy infringement and non-compliant data sources are seen again and again. Standing at this fork in the road, MeDomino prepared early and chose the bright side from the very beginning.
"When we first wanted to work on data insight, we went to law firm partners to discuss questions such as how to do it legally and whether the current approach would be compliant," Lu Wenqing told the Beijing Equity Exchange.
It is understood that the information collected by MeDomino comes from public channels. Sensitive personal information, including personal property and health status, is compared against national laws related to the internet, data, and personal information, and is carefully reviewed and processed. It is worth noting that Lu frankly said that, as a display enterprise on the Beijing College Student Entrepreneurship Board, MeDomino received considerable legal consulting support from the Beijing Equity Exchange. Lu explained: "The Beijing Equity Exchange helped by inviting professional lawyers to answer legal questions, while also providing equity consulting and legal support, reducing the company's cost of legal compliance."
In 2021, MeDomino received the Market Research Personal Information Protection Requirements Standard Compliance Certificate.
"This year, we hope to serve more healthcare companies, including local enterprises in different directions, and serve more patients with high-quality and efficient services," Lu told the Beijing Equity Exchange.
04
As the saying goes, cycling on the road, with dreams ahead.
Lu Wenqing often chooses to bike from home to the office, a one-way ride of 40 minutes. This route also carries his deep cultivation of healthcare data products and his pursuit of excellence.
In recent years, healthcare digitalization has grown explosively, and MeDomino has gradually moved toward center stage by leveraging the industry backdrop and its own strengths. As many young talents have joined, they have also injected fresh energy into MeDomino. Lu introduced Li Qiling, the company's front-end technology lead, who was born after 1995 and graduated from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Li joined the company as a fresh graduate intern and, as a new force in the company, demonstrated strong technical R&D capabilities during his work. The patient charts he led in designing present complex data in a visual, clear, and understandable way, and have been well received by customers and the market. More importantly, Lu believes Li's curiosity is one of the most valuable qualities for data technology research.
MeDomino is currently conducting large-scale recruitment. In talent empowerment, the Beijing College Student Entrepreneurship Board has helped the company solve real talent needs by providing access to Beijing university campus recruitment fairs, social recruitment channels, and other support. "Through the policies of the municipal human resources and social security bureau, the Entrepreneurship Board has strengthened listed companies' appeal to talent and has given us great help in recruiting fresh graduates," Lu told the Beijing Equity Exchange. It is understood that the Beijing Equity Exchange can provide college student enterprises with guidance and services in business registration agency support, financing matchmaking, standardized mentoring, and talent recruitment. Based on the characteristics of different stages such as preparation, early startup, and growth, it provides precise service matching. Li Qiling, the front-end lead and one of MeDomino's post-1995 new forces, said: "The Entrepreneurship Board's support policies for university entrepreneurship talent effectively ease young people's concerns about joining a startup."
The healthcare digitalization industry is developing rapidly, continuously giving rise to new technologies, shaping new business models, cultivating new ecosystems, and creating new value. We are now in an era of innovation, and major healthcare companies are actively moving toward digitalization. When it comes to digital transformation, one thousand pharmaceutical professionals may have one thousand different understandings.
In Lu Wenqing's view, healthcare digitalization is an inevitable trend with broad potential. Compared with traditional industries, intelligence can shorten the time cost of data mining. Moving from offline to online, earlier digitalization merely achieved paperlessness; today, there is still great room for intelligent improvement. Therefore, enterprise digital technology cannot be realized overnight. It is a gradual process.
In the future, MeDomino will continue to act as a pioneer in digital transformation, rooted in the healthcare industry, providing precise business insight to more customers with high quality and efficiency, building customer networks, and safeguarding pharmaceutical companies' digital marketing through innovative models.
