Naver Corp and Kakao Corp, two of South Korea’s largest IT companies, have shared innovative applications of AI in healthcare.
In the HIMSS24 APAC panel session,”Tech Titans in Health: Naver and Kakao’s Role in Transforming Healthcare,” Kakao Healthcare CEO Dr. Hwang Hee and Dr. Dongchul Cha, Head of the Medical Innovation Center at NAVER Healthcare Lab, shared their organizations’ respective contributions to advancing the digital healthcare in South Korea.
Dr. Hwang discussed possible solutions aimed at optimizing clinical data.
“There are so many options to choose from, but from a technology perspective, I think federated learning is a promising and optimistic solution to address (data) hurdles.”
Given the unstructured nature of patient data, federated AI models for learning and training to generate structured clinical data could be critical, Dr. Hwang suggested.
“We can use conventional (natural language processing) NLP in combination with (large language models) LLM for the model training set. Kakao Healthcare has developed and implemented automapping for standardizing code for international (data management) standards.”
This process, he continued, could reduce human and economic resources by as much as 70% to 80%.
Dr. Cha shared a similar process at Naver Healthcare Lab.
“(Naver) recently launched a symptom checker that allows users to view health symptoms and make reservations with the doctors. The patient’s medical history would be integrated with the EHR, and both parties can save time,” he explained.
“The records are automatically converted (into) clinically organized doctor’s notes. I, as a doctor, can proceed to physical examination after obtaining the notes, which reduces my cognitive load.”
Dr. Cha emphasized the value of additional input from doctors and specialists in combating possible ‘AI hallucinations’.
“We recruited a group of doctors and specialists to verify all answers (on the platform). Using this approach has two benefits: users get verifiable answers and irrelevant AI questions can be replaced with valuable questions formulated by specialist doctors. “
Such innovation, Dr. Cha said, serves as a “physician friend” who will always be there for the patients, while at the same time helping to augment medical capabilities virtually.