The joint venture with the Chinese healthcare unicorn aligns with the ride-hailing company’s ambitions to create an “everyday” app

Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant Grab has partnered up with Chinese healthcare and insurance unicorn Ping An Good Doctor to provide online healthcare services on its platform.

The joint venture will see GrabPlatform offer an array of integrated medical services such as artificial intelligence (AI) assisted online medical consultations, medicine delivery and appointment bookings. Grab users will be able to use GrabPay to complete transactions.

The joint venture will also seek partnerships with governments, hospitals, doctors and other relevant key stakeholders in each market to provide these medical services.

The GrabPlatform, launched last year, is the central driver of the company’s initiative to become “an everyday app” (like WeChat). Essentially, it integrates the functions of transportation, F&B, courier, and payments in just one app, by bringing on board external partners. For example, just last month Grab announced it will offer grocery delivery services via a joint venture with Indonesia-based online grocery startup HappyFresh.

Grab’s partnership with Ping An Good Doctor would have likely been orchestrated by SoftBank since both companies are backed the Japanese telecom giant. It is another step in SoftBank’s mission to align its investments together, building a large network of interconnected world-changing companies to accelerate their reach across all markets.

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“Ping An Good Doctor will become a globally influential internet healthcare ecosystem platform. We will replicate our successful model in the Chinese market to the overseas market and export our mature technologies and services, resolving medical issues worldwide,” said Wang Tao, Chairman and CEO of Ping An Good Doctor, which currently has over 200 million users.

The joint venture will go live in the first quarter of 2019. Grab said it will be a phased launch but declined to mention its first entry markets. Grab, however, said it was “looking closely at Indonesia” — a country that, according to WHO statistics, has only one physician for nearly 5,000 people.

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