The opportunity for mobile health services in China is huge. China has 95 million people with diabetes. It has 170 million people with hypertension and 3 million more each year. The country also has some 165 million people with heart disease.

China also boasts an estimated 900 million mobile phone users. A minority of them are smartphone users, but the country is expected to be the biggest market for smartphone app downloads soon -- Apple only just launched a tailored AppStore for Chinese users last fall.

Despite the massive opportunity, Dr. Yusheng Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Apricot Forest, said that there are very few mobile health startups working to address the needs of the Chinese market.

"In three years in China I think about half the population will have a smartphone," Zhang told MobiHealthNews during an interview this week. "Smartphones are definitely the future, but right now the best way to reach 80 percent of the population is through SMS. The iPhone is in China but it skews to the high end. Physicians love iPhones in China, too."

To be clear, Apricot Forest is very new. Zhang, a medical doctor, officially co-founded Apricot Forest with two engineers only a few weeks ago. Zhang left WellPoint's business strategy group to pursue the mHealth opportunity in China. Before WellPoint, Zhang was at Johns Hopkins University where he earned his MPH/MBA. The startup is currently seeking US-based angel investors as well as content partners.

Zhang and his team are ambitious. They are currently developing clinical reference apps for physicians that pull content from leading Chinese medical journals and publications. The apps will include continuing medical education (CME) offerings too and be supported by pharmaceutical advertising.

"Our business model is very similar to Epocrates," Zhang said. "It's a very well-defined, clear cut model. Epocrates isn't in China," he said.

Zhang said Apricot Forest is still working to figure out the best way to engage patients, and while Zhang points to Healthagen's iTriage app as an example of a consumer app that "gets it right," for now Zhang is focused on pursuing "personalized" text messages for Apricot Forest's consumer offerings.

"I'd call Text4Baby semi-personalized because [the SMS tips are] based on your week," Zhang said. "If you have complications with your pregnancy there's not a separate service for that. We would offer more personalized texts." Similar services for chronic diseases, especially diabetes or cancer need to be more personalized than Text4Baby, Zhang said.

Zhang sees opportunities for SMS-based consumer facing services around maternal health, chronic disease care, and public health services. Smoking cessation is of particular interest to Apricot Forest.

Earlier this year the Chinese government announced future plans to ban smoking in public places -- the first such federal proposal in that country. More than 1 million people die of smoking related illness in China. Zhang estimates that some 300 million people smoke in China. Zhang pointed to the recent Text2Stop study published in the Lancet as evidence of the effect a smoking cessation service could have in China.

"I bet it would be even more successful [in China]," Zhang said. "In the US or the UK if you want help to quit smoking you can find a counselor or get help from a physician, but in China the only way to quit is cold turkey. If we manage to bring the percentage of smokers down by just 1 or 2 percent, that is probably millions of people."

"This is one of our biggest opportunities," he said. One of many.