Finance ministry forum weighs national AI infrastructure for medical data

The finance ministry's strategic economic advisory panel and two Yonsei University research institutes jointly held a forum Monday on building national AI infrastructure for the safe training, verification and use of medical data, the ministry said.

The event, held at Yonsei's AI Innovation Institute, brought government officials, medical professionals and company representatives together to discuss the practical problems that arise when medical data is put to work, and the direction of state infrastructure supporting both personal data protection and the development and verification of medical AI.

Park Young-sun, chair of the strategic economic advisory panel, said in her opening address that the country must establish common standards and a secure linkage system so that medical data can be connected and analyzed safely, leading to better public health and innovation in the bio industry. She also called for privacy-enhancing technologies such as homomorphic encryption to be applied in medical settings, and said the gains from using medical data should spread to small and mid-sized bio and health care companies and startups.

Homomorphic encryption allows data to be analyzed and computed while it remains encrypted, without ever being decrypted. The technology was among the policy and technical tasks presented at the forum, alongside a strategy for AI transformation in health care, the linkage and standardization of medical data using existing infrastructure, homomorphic-encryption-based data sharing, and AI systems that work without moving data off site.

Ki Chang Keum, Yonsei University's vice president for medical affairs and head of its medical center, pointed to the hospital's own use of AI, including support for writing clinical records and the automatic organization of patient consultations. He said handling medical data safely is the starting point for applying such tools in practice.

Speakers also stressed that earning public trust requires making the purpose and authorization for medical data use clear, and putting in place sufficient verification of AI analysis results and a responsible operating system.

Kim Gu-nyeon, head of the support group at the National Bio Innovation Committee, said the government will back the safe use of data and work to ease the difficulties faced by researchers and industry.

The finance ministry said it will continue to work with other relevant ministries to identify policy tasks for the safe use of medical data and for innovation in the bio industry, drawing on the views from the field and expert proposals raised at the forum.