For securing Biz Model
The South Korean government will jointly build “distributed bio big data” with bio health industry in order to secure a business model for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in advance. Based on the system, it plans to develop a new business model that uses quality healthcare information accumulated at medical institutions and take the lead in the sector.
The government will also strengthen its support systems to help develop new personalized medicines based on big data as well as medical devices that converge artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) technologies.
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy held a conference under the chairmanship of Minister Joo Hyung-hwan at Marriott Hotel in Panygyo, Gyeonggi Province, on April 17 and announced its bio health industry development strategy to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Joo said, “Until now, the South Korean bio health industry has been busy chasing the market led by global companies. However, there are new opportunities now as market is approaching an inflection point of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The government will make haste to build the bio health big data system which is a key resource of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Based on the system, public and private companies will join forces to design new medical, healthcare service business models and develop new personalized treatments and converged medical appliances.
The heart of the development strategy is the construction of big data. The government will establish “healthcare big data platform” connected with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which deals in only analytical data between hospitals and companies, instead of existing integrated method providing original data of hospitals to companies, as part of its plan to vitalize the distribution of medical data. To this end, the government formed a task force (TF) headed by Dr. Si Young Song, dean at Yonsei University College of Medicine to build a dispersed bio big data system. The TF consists of agencies that possess data, like hospitals, agencies that need data, such as pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and cosmetics producers, and data intermediaries, including telecommunication companies and software developers.
The government will also eliminate regulations that obstruct the development of innovative bio services. It will collect opinions from the industry by operating an oombudsman system for bio regulation improvement and eliminate only offending regulations by introducing the negative regulation system. The government will also accelerate the development of new medicines by using technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It will select a consortium consisting of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and information and communications technology companies and help it develop new personalized drugs based on big data. In addition, it will help domestic companies enter the domestic clinical trial service market dominated by multinational companies and start supporting them to design clinical trials in the new medicine service sector from next year.
In order to revitalize the bio sector, the government will also create a bio fund in the early stage worth 38.5 billion won (US$33.93 million) as well as programs to support bio health startups.