The news recently came out that the TikTok ownwer, ByteDance, has paid $1.5 billion for Amcare Healthcare, one of China’s largest private hospital chains. You might wonder why TikTok’s owner would want to buy a hospital chain. Plus, I can already here the privacy critics coming to complain about TikTok (known for its privacy and tracking issues) owning a healthcare organization. Can you imagine the uproar if news came out that Facebook had acquired a big healthcare system in the US. It would go crazy with fears over privacy even more than the ones we heard when Amazon acquired OneMedical and Google acquired Fitbit.
While it’s interesting to see ByteDance acquire a hospital, it’s likely not connected to TikTok at all (Side Note: Be sure to follow @healthcareittoday on TikTok). Maybe they can leverage some marketing on TIkTok, but I don’t really see it being connected at all. Instead, ByteDance also owns a healthcare app Xiahoe which works in things like online health consults, hospital appointments and wellness services.
What this connection indicates to me is that China understands what seems to be playing out in the US as well. If you want to address healthcare challenges, you need more than just an app. The app can do a lot of things and is even more powerful when tied to sensors and wearables. It’s even more powerful when connected to a trained professional. However, to really move the needle on healthcare, you still need to connect the app to some brick and mortar healthcare services. That’s why I think Amazon acquired OneMedical as well.
Something we often forget in the US is the size of China’s market. I learned this a long time ago when I was watching an interview with a lady who hosted a travel show in China. For all intents and purposes it was an average travel show, but the show had 100 million viewers. Most NFL football games only get about $30 million viewers and a great TV show in the US gets over $10 million viewers. Yes, I know this is changing with streaming services, but this is to illustrate the point that many of us in the US don’t really understand the scale that exists in China. 1.4 Billion people is a lot more than the 300 million in the US.
With this in mind, it’s going to be interesting to see how ByteDance does in healthcare. They’ll be working on a scale that many of us in the US barely understand. For those of you on TikTok, don’t worry. It’s hard to imagine ByteDance acquiring a US health system.
