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The South Korean government is expanding the country's public health and medical data infrastructure as it further supports hospitals in adopting AI.
A committee within the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW), tasked with deliberating on policies concerning health and medical data, has recently announced new initiatives to promote the use of data for AI adoption across the healthcare system.
One of the Health and Medical Data Policy Deliberation Committee's current projects is linking clinical data from three national university hospitals to the Health and Medical Big Data Platform, which currently holds administrative data from public institutions.
By the second half of 2026, it plans to begin gradually providing public access to a nationally integrated bio big data database comprising 770,000 individuals. The $400 million biobank, first announced in late 2024, is expected to become fully accessible by 2028. The 24-member committee is also working to connect health data across hospitals for AI training and clinical research while ensuring data security and privacy protection.
Based on the MOHW press release, the committee will also support at least 20 projects to verify medical AI solutions prior to their adoption in health facilities, while helping hospitals develop the capability to assess and integrate AI tools.
The ministry also revealed plans to expand its data access voucher programme, growing the scheme from eight projects in 2025 to 40 in 2026. The programme, which began in July, provides AI startups and small enterprises with up to 400 million won (over $280,000) per project to access medical data from partner hospitals. It followed a similar programme by the Seoul government in April.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
The MOHW has been assisting hospitals in establishing data infrastructure and harnessing health data for medical research and improving healthcare services since 2020. In early 2023, it launched the data utilisation project, supporting digital health researchers to access data from partner hospitals. The project designated five major hospitals as centres for safe medical data utilisation.
Meanwhile, it was announced that the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency plans to secure graphics processing units to enhance its cloud-based health data access services for public researchers, enabling remote analysis of large data volumes.
The National Cancer Center Korea, which is setting up a public cancer and clinical data libraries covering eight cancer types, is also planning to build a national cancer big data platform and precision medicine infrastructure.
The Health Ministry also disclosed plans to streamline data sharing approvals by developing standard operating procedures for institutional review boards and establishing a shared data review system.
