Youth Health Platform Research Report

The core contradiction of the current domestic youth health platform for 10-18 year olds is not insufficient technical reserves and insufficient policy support, but a systematic mismatch between the standardized functional design on the supply side and the fragmented needs of schools, doctors, students, and families on the demand side.； After pilot verification in multiple provinces, the optimal solution is not to build a unified all-purpose platform that covers all scenarios, but to build a hierarchical collaborative small ecosystem with "provincial unified basic functions, local autonomy in value-added services, and lightweight implantation of scene entrances." The current implementation success rate of this model is 42% higher than that of the all-in-one platform model.

Last year, I followed the project team to visit 21 primary and secondary schools in 7 prefectures and cities, and I encountered many more pitfalls than I imagined when dealing with the heads of education, health, and Internet companies. At first, we followed the idea of ​​a university’s public health team to build an all-in-one platform, integrating physical monitoring, mental health screening, myopia prevention and control, nutritional intervention, and infectious disease reporting. There were 17 optical function modules listed. Before going online, we had experts review it. Everyone felt that the logic was closed loop and the design was perfect. As a result, after three months of going online, we pulled data in the background and the activity rate was only 11.7%. Among them, 78% of the active users clicked in only when the school required them to check in, and less than 2% of the users actually actively used it.

Let me tell you an interesting story. When I was working in a junior high school in Jinan, I met a boy in the second grade of junior high school wearing OK glasses. The school informed him that he should report the results of the vision review for the month on the platform. He fiddled with his mobile phone for ten minutes. One moment he asked his parents for the authorization code, and the other moment he had to fill in three years of eye history. Finally, he put the phone back in his pocket and muttered, "It's too troublesome. I asked the school doctor to fill it in for me." It was originally a function designed to reduce the workload of the school nurse, but in the end it turned the work back into the hands of the school nurse, which is a bit funny to say.

There are actually huge differences in the industry about this track right now, and it’s because people from different standpoints have completely different ideas. The public health team of Beijing Normal University has always insisted on a closed loop of the whole process, believing that only by unifying all the data of physical examination, screening, intervention and follow-up can we truly form a full-cycle management of adolescent health. This logic is completely tenable from an academic point of view, but it got stuck when it was implemented - the data barriers between the health and education systems are not that easy to break through. If you ask the school to transmit the physical examination data to the disease control system, you have to go through three levels of approval. By the time the data is transferred, the students are on summer vacation.

People who make Internet products have completely different ideas. Last year, I talked with the product manager of a head health APP. He said that we should make lightweight content, promote eye-protection animations, height-growing recipes, and decompression short videos to students, rely on interesting content to drive traffic, and then gradually add functions. This method of play has indeed worked well in the C-end market, but it will not work in the campus scene - the school does not allow students to watch short videos in class. No matter how interesting your content is, students will not have the chance to watch it.

On the contrary, it was the school doctor at the grassroots level who said the most poignant thing. I spent an afternoon chatting with the school doctor at a middle school in a county in Zhejiang. There were three reports to be filled out on her desk, namely the physical fitness monitoring form required by the Education Bureau, the myopia prevention and control form required by the CDC, and the infectious disease reporting statistics form required by the street. She typed the report and said to me, "Don't make so many bells and whistles when building a platform. As long as I can fill in the data once and the three departments can get it at the same time, I will burn it for you." You see, the core requirement is actually that simple. The dozen or so functions we did before were all useless burdens to her.

The most controversial issue in the entire industry right now is actually the issue of data ownership. All parties have their own positions, and no one can convince anyone. The education department said that student health data belongs to student status-related data and should be managed uniformly by the education department. ； The health department said that health data belongs to medical data and must comply with the regulatory requirements for medical data. ； The company that operates the platform said that it has invested tens of millions in research and development costs. The desensitized data can always be used to optimize products, right? Parents are even more dissatisfied. Last year, it was revealed that a local platform sold students' myopia data to local optical stores, causing a stir. Now when many parents hear that they need to fill in health information, their first reaction is "Will their information be sold again?"

To be honest, I have seen too many platforms that cost tens of millions to build and were finally left to collect dust. It wasn’t until I saw the pilot project in that county in Zhejiang last year that I felt that this matter had finally found the right direction. They have not built any unified platform at all. They have set three mandatory functions at the provincial level: unified reporting of data, automatic generation of reports required by each department, and full-process privacy-encrypted storage. The remaining functions are completely open to local governments to add. For example, because the local myopia rate is high, a public hospital has been added to make an appointment for optometry. Students can go directly to the examination with the appointment code, and the results are automatically synchronized to the platform. ； In some places where the obesity rate is high, they cooperate with local sports schools to hold free fat loss training camps on weekends. You can sign up directly in the mini program. The student side does not need to download the APP, it is directly embedded in the local education mini-program. Parents can also receive health reminders of their children on their own WeChat. Even the temperature measuring gun in the security room is connected to the platform. If the student's temperature exceeds 37.3 degrees, a message will be automatically sent to the parents and the school doctor. Even the school doctor's temperature measurement registration book is saved. With such a simple model, after half a year of operation, students' compliance with health intervention increased from 23% to 67%, and the school doctor's reporting workload was directly reduced by 80%.

In fact, after doing research in this field for almost three years, my biggest feeling is that everyone always wants to make a perfect product that covers all needs, but in the end they fail to do anything well. Just like if you give a gift to a middle school student and stuff all the things you think are good into a box, he may not want it at all. Instead, you only give him a pen that he just needs, which he can use for half a year. The outcome of this track has not yet been determined, and no one dares to say that their model is the standard answer, but one thing is for sure: any platform design that has not been in the school doctor's office, chatted with middle school students for half an hour, or heard complaints from parents will most likely be self-enhancing in the end.