South Korea Unveils Measures to Expand the Use of Healthcare Data for AI-Enabled Care

In parallel, efforts to strengthen AI pilot capacity at medical institutions will see the funding of 20 new medical AI demonstration projects in 2026.

South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare has announced a set of new measures aimed at broadening the use of healthcare data to support AI-enabled medical services, research, and innovation across the nation’s health system.

The new measures were outlined in a discussion Healthcare Data Policy Deliberation Committee.

The initiative seeks to focus on leveraging data resources, improving access for researchers and startups, and strengthening evaluation frameworks for medical AI technologies while maintaining safeguards for personal information.

Under the new initiative, clinical data from three national university hospitals will be incorporated into the Healthcare Big Data Platform, which has primarily contained administrative datasets to date.

The Ministry also aims to accelerate the secondary use of data generated through national research and development programmes to boost medical innovation.

Concurrently, the government plans to scale the National Integrated Bio Big Data project to 770,000 participants by 2028, with phased data releases expected to begin in the second half of 2026.

Additionally, efforts to enhance the support for medical data use rights with expansion from eight projects in 2025 to forty in 2026 are also in the pipeline.

This move is expected to enable improved access to medical data for medical AI startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Further, to streamline the ethical and procedural review of data use, the government plans to introduce standard operating procedures for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Data Review Boards (DRBs), along with a joint DRB system.

In parallel, efforts to strengthen AI pilot capacity at medical institutions will see the funding of 20 new medical AI demonstration projects in 2026.

These projects will focus on the systematic verification of AI solutions’ performance and clinical impact before broader adoption.

Furthermore, the Ministry seeks to strengthen institutional support for Healthcare Data-Driven Hospitals designed to integrate platforms for AI research and validation across the country.

Commenting on the initiative, Vice Minister of Health and Welfare Lee Hyung-hoon, “The government will establish legal and institutional frameworks for the secure use of medical data, increasing policy support and investment to drive the data lifecycle from medical AI R&D to deployment.”

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