South Korea to link all medical facilities to AI platform, expand AI use in emergency transport

The government will expand an AI-powered system for identifying hospitals to receive emergency patients and support the use of AI services at clinics offering essential care in underserved areas.

As part of broader efforts to close gaps in regional, essential and public healthcare, the government plans to pursue an AI transformation by connecting medical institutions nationwide — including regional and district anchor hospitals — to an AI platform dubbed the "public healthcare highway."

The Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Science and ICT unveiled the plan, centered on an "AI Basic Healthcare Strategy," at a roundtable on regional, essential and public healthcare chaired by President Lee Jae Myung at Cheong Wa Dae on Wednesday.

To ensure quality care in underserved areas, the government will introduce AI packages for clinical, administrative and health management tasks — including automatic medical record generation — at public health centers and branch clinics nationwide. In remote mountain communities, visiting nurses will be supported in conducting AI-assisted remote consultations with physicians at other locations.

Essential-specialty clinics in underserved areas, such as obstetrics and gynecology and pediatrics practices, will receive "primary care AX vouchers" that reimburse them for using AI solutions suited to their needs.

To address the problem of emergency rooms turning away patients, the government will also push to expand what it calls an "integrated emergency AI platform" that uses AI from the moment paramedics begin transport through the selection of an appropriate receiving hospital.

A Ministry of Health and Welfare official said the system would allow community hospitals to enter or automatically share data on their available medical resources, enabling facilities to view one another's capacity and coordinate on selecting a transfer hospital. "However, it will be the emergency room or the treating medical team — the ones who must make the final decision — who decide whether to accept a patient based on the AI's recommendation. AI will not make 100 percent of the decisions," the official said.

The government is also reviewing a measure that would allow emergency medical personnel to access the personal health records of subscribers who have given prior consent, for cases where a patient is unconscious or otherwise unable to make decisions. The records system — called "My Health Record," or PHR — consolidates a patient's medical information scattered across multiple hospitals.

A plan to share medical information through the PHR system is also being pursued, so that patients would no longer need to copy medical imaging files each time they transfer to a different hospital.

The government will develop an emergency room-specific clinical decision support system that uses emergency patient data — including paramedic logs — to help allocate hospital resources more efficiently. The emergency medical information network will also be upgraded to analyze real-time transport data and each hospital's treatment capacity, enabling better matching of patients to appropriate facilities.

Regional public hospitals, which have struggled to adopt AI due to poor fiscal conditions, will be connected to a platform tentatively called the "public healthcare AI highway," which will carry a range of medical AI tools. Starting with nine institutions in the second half of this year, all 72 regional and district anchor medical institutions are to be brought on board by 2029.

Centered on national university hospitals, the government will develop an "AI intelligent hospital information system" that applies AI to every service a patient receives from arrival to discharge. Medical AI development will also be pursued, focusing on high-demand areas such as chronic and frequently occurring diseases.

A pilot project will be launched to establish region-specific "AI-specialized hospitals" that serve as leading models for AI transformation in clinical settings. A "medical data map" will also be built to provide a clear overview of the data each medical institution holds.

The government will establish a national health and medical data hub that combines and opens up public, clinical and research data to train Korea-specific medical AI models.

Building on that foundation, the government plans to support the development of "Korean medical AI" — creating a framework to address regional, essential and public healthcare challenges based on domestic clinical data and AI models, without relying on foreign systems.

The government will also conduct a broad review of mechanisms to evaluate and reward the healthcare outcomes delivered by AI technology, with the aim of ensuring its sustainable use in medicine.

"AI is a tool for filling the gaps in regional, essential and public healthcare and protecting the lives of the people," Minister of Health and Welfare Jeong Eun-kyeong said. "We will work with relevant ministries to implement the AI Basic Healthcare Strategy without fail."