On January 24, 2026, at the GBA Healthcare Association Annual Conference (GBAHA), Hao Df Online unveiled its “2025 Annual Good Doctor Rankings,” recognizing 737 doctors nationwide for their professional expertise and quality service. The release of the list carries added significance, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Ant Health’s acquisition of the platform.
Founded in 2006 by Beijing Xinyi Qiangguo Technology, Hao Df Online is a pioneering internet healthcare platform in China. Its services include online consultations, remote outpatient visits, post-treatment management, family doctor subscription services, and disease knowledge dissemination. Accessible via its app, website, WeChat official account, and mini-programs, the platform also features the country’s first patient experience sharing system, allowing users to rate doctors and share their medical experiences.
In April 2016, Hao Df established the Yinchuan Smart Internet Hospital in Ningxia, initiating remote expert consultations and family doctor services to support hierarchical medical system development. In October 2022, founder Wang Hang represented the platform in showcasing “Internet Healthcare” achievements for the national “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative. In January 2025, Ant Group completed its acquisition of Hao Df Online, announcing plans to jointly develop AI medical assistant services. Hao Df Online subsequently became part of Ant Group’s Alipay Digital Healthcare division. By December 2025, the platform had over 280,000 registered doctors and had served more than 91 million patients. By January 2026, after integration with Alipay and Ant Yikang apps, the registered doctor base had expanded to 300,000.
Zhang Junjie, Vice President of Ant Group and Head of Healthcare Business, revealed at the conference that the integration has accelerated synergies: doctors now reach more patients nationwide, and users can easily access consultations through both Alipay and Ant Yikang apps.
Hao Df Online is also upgrading its doctor workstations with new AI-powered tools such as DeepSearch, creating personalized “AI assistants” to help doctors reduce workload, enhance efficiency, and improve the patient experience. The platform plans to explore innovative practice models with doctors, further amplifying professional expertise.
The expansion of service access points has been particularly transformative. Ant Group has heavily invested in healthcare AI models in recent years, launching the Ant Yikang app in 2025 to serve as an AI health assistant for all users. With over 30 million monthly active users and 10 million daily consultations, the app now links seamlessly with Hao Df Online, allowing users to be matched with qualified doctors across the country. For physicians, this means their influence extends far beyond their local hospitals, reaching patients nationwide.
Doctors have welcomed the change. One physician, active on Hao Df Online for ten years, noted that the platform removes geographic limitations, allowing them to serve patients from neighboring provinces to the entire country. AI handles repetitive tasks such as medical history collection, freeing up more time for direct patient care.
In addition, Hao Df Online’s health education content now integrates fully with Alipay, enabling doctors to conduct live broadcasts and share videos that reach millions of users. In the past year alone, doctors produced over 15,000 live sessions and more than 100,000 articles and videos. This represents a shift from treating illnesses to promoting preventive health, highlighting the growing importance of health education in medical value.
AI adoption is also increasing among doctors. More than 1,000 physicians, led by six academicians, have launched their own AI “avatars” on the Ant Yikang app, answering over 27 million user health queries to date. Digital technology is fundamentally reshaping healthcare delivery and efficiency.
Academician Zhong Nanshan, speaking at the conference, emphasized that smart healthcare is meant not to replace doctors, but to enable them to focus on patient-centered care, addressing the persistent issues of expensive and difficult access to medical services in China.
AI assistants aim to tackle efficiency challenges directly. Liu Junwei, general manager of Ant Group’s Medical and Health Business Unit and head of AI Health Manager, outlined upgrades coming to the Hao Df doctor workstation in 2026. Enhancements include deepening “human-machine collaboration,” allowing doctors to create AI avatars for answering routine queries and providing health education. Each doctor will also have a personal AI assistant to collect medical histories, assist during consultations by providing real-time diagnostic suggestions, and generate post-visit summaries and personalized follow-up plans. Additionally, the new DeepSearch feature will support literature review and clinical research, creating a Chinese version of Open Evidence freely available to physicians.
At the conference, Hao Df Online released its 2025 Annual Good Doctor Rankings, marking the 13th consecutive year of the list. The rankings, which assess service volume, depth, responsiveness, patient satisfaction, and offline reputation, recognized 737 top doctors from a pool of over 300,000. This year, 668 were named “Annual Good Doctors,” 15 as “Young Good Doctors,” 48 as “Long-term Online Doctors,” and 30 received the newly introduced “Health Education Doctor” award.
Founder Wang Hang highlighted that 2026 marks both the second year of Hao Df’s integration into the Ant ecosystem and the 20th anniversary of its founding. He said the combination of Ant Group’s platform resources and AI capabilities has unlocked new professional value, helping Hao Df confidently enter the AI era. The platform plans to continue innovating practice models, expanding the professional impact of doctors, and delivering health services to more people.
The evolution of internet healthcare in China is shifting from monetizing traffic to realizing professional value. AI tools now enable doctors to extend their service reach, improve clinical efficiency, and accelerate research support, effectively amplifying the impact of medical expertise nationwide.
Source: guancha, sina, jinguxun, ant group, eeo
