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Jan. 29 (NBD) -- China's largest online health care professional community DXY.cn released paid open classes in its app with an attempt to provide an online education platform for clinicians. 

DXY's highly specialized open classes meet the demands of the special user group and increase the user viscosity of its app.

Doctors, as the main users of DXY, have the need for constant learning. According to a report on how digital life influences doctors that joint published by DYX and Kantar Health, doctors spend an average of about 29.2 hours surfing the internet, with half of the time for reading medical related information. The internet has replaced the traditional channels to be the major source for doctors to gain professional information. 

Among all users of the DXY's open class platform, clinicians account for 81 percent of the total. while 42.6 percent users are doctors with master or doctoral degree. For the doctor users, 43 percent of them are working in first-tier and second-tier cities.

Ji Lingyan, head of DXY open class planning, pointed out that due to doctors' heavy clinical and research work, they have very limited time for further study. The offline training, offline academic conferences and seminars are time-consuming and uneconomical for doctors.

In the current internet era driven by big data, the open classes are able to break the time and geographical restrictions, providing solution to the problem that doctors can only acquire fragmented and unsystematic knowledge. 

For example, the use of clinical antibiotics is a necessary skill for every doctor, but the learning of how to use it is always contraversial. If doctors choose to gain knowledge and communicate with others by attending some offline training, it could cost them 2000 to 3000 yuan (316.1 to 474.2 U.S. dollars) and they still can't obtain systematic knowledge. 

In August last year, DXY released an online course "Rational Use of Antibiotics" priced 488 yuan (77.1 U.S. dollars). The course draw around 2500 users within 4 months, generating revenue of more than 100 million yuan (15.8 million U.S. dollars).  

Paid knowledge services and products have drawn much attention in recent 2 years and the year 2016 is regarded as the starting point of such products, when the question-and-answer website Zhihu, the audio sharing platform Ximalaya FM and others unveiled their paid services. 

Under such circumstances, it is innovative to combine internet health care with the paid knowledge services, but it still needs testing by the market.

Zhou Xiaohan, vice president of Ximalaya FM indicated that the successful paid products entail high quality content. Only the scarce and professional contents could make profits, and the interesting expression, good match with users' demands as well as the strong personal brand will also drive users to pay for products.

According to the survey conducted by Tencent's research institution Penguin Intelligence and report from China Internet Network Information Center, 55.3 percent of the netizens have paid for knowledge products, 38 percent of which are satisfied with paid services. The first imputes for users to pay for knowledge is to acquiring targeted professional knowledge or opinions, and the second is to save time as well as energy and also to accumulate experience and improve themselves.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn