Internet giants' healthy future in China

A doctor talks with his patient via an online terminal at a hospital in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

In July, it rolled out a cloud computing project in partnership with the Beijing municipal government. This involves analyzing and storing health-related data from smart devices.

"Unlike Alibaba which has to tempt companies to its platforms before accumulating pharmacy business data, Baidu is a natural accumulator of records," Lin said,

As for Tencent, it has invested $70 million in dxy.cn, the largest online medical community in China, and provided funding for guahao.com, which makes appointments with doctors online. These portals are now on WeChat, which allows them to access the site's 600 million regular users each month.

"WeChat is an ideal platform to offer customized or personalized medical services because it can accurately profile users," Qin said.

Naturally, Alibaba has even bigger plans. It already sells over-the-counter medicines online and could now expand into health insurance.

"Alibaba is now heavily involved in the medical industry chain," Qin said. "Compared with Tencent and Baidu, it has greater internal resources in online medical care, which will give it an edge in developing more products."

Earlier this year, Alibaba Health Information Technology linked up China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co Ltd. "We don't rule out the possibility of rolling out Yu'ebao-like online health insurance product in the future," Zhang Lei, who is in charge of public relations for Alibaba Health, said, referring to Yu'ebao's popular online investment fund.

Ma Si contributed to this story