Toronto-based Ask The Doctor, a health platform that connects users to doctors to receive immediate help, announced today that it will begin operations in its new office in Shenzhen, China to meet the country’s demand.
As of today, Ask The Doctor, which allows users to ask doctors medical questions in any language, will ensure that its main page of Ask the Doctor China will be in Mandarin, and the Chinese Yuan will be accepted currency.
The company, which acquired both India and the United Kingdom’s largest health platforms in 2015, is also planning to make its library of questions and answers available in Mandarin over the coming year. Ask the Doctor said that it has over 20,000 general physicians and specialists on its platform.
“Expanding to China was a no-brainer,” said Edward Tan, the medical director of Ask a Doctor China. “With a population of 1.3 billion people of which more than half have smartphones, our service is proving to be extremely valuable. Access to immediate and proper medical advice is very limited in the country, especially in rural China. We realized this early on and made expanding to China a priority.”
Ask The Doctor’s CEO Prakash Chand says a larger focus on the Chinese market brings the company one step closer to achieving its goal of giving “everyone equal access to quality medical advice.”