Within two years of digital transformation, Catholic Medical Center, one of the largest medical institutions in South Korea, gained capabilities to provide personalized care powered by big data and AI.
In-Young Choi, professor and head of the Catholic Information Convergence Institute at CMC, shared their journey during the session: “Personalized care with big data from hospitals and digital health technology.”
CMC began transitioning its eight affiliated hospitals, including the flagship Seoul St Mary’s Hospital, into “IT-specialized institutes” or smart hospitals in 2021.
To facilitate this transformation, the Catholic Information Convergence Institution (CICI) was born.
Through the CICI, which has three divisions focused on EMR, big data and AI, CMC has developed a seven-year roadmap for big data. This includes the development of nuCDW, the clinical data warehouse that integrates and anonymizes all data in CMC hospitals.
In addition to facilitating big data analytics, the nuCDW, which hosts 1.7 petabytes of data from 15 million patients, also enables the organization’s development of internal AI.
Big data and AI-powered digital solutions
Using big data and AI, CMC has built several digital solutions to support physicians’ personalized care delivery.
A good example is the mobile patient application. It offers comprehensive outpatient and inpatient services, from booking appointments, navigating the hospital and accessing wait status and hospitalization information to selecting meals and payments.
CMC has also set up mobile kiosks for patient registration and to collect and access patient-reported results.
To give patients easy access to their health data anywhere, CMC also created the MyData platform.
The patient data portal grew out of the organization’s involvement in the Ministry of Health and Wellness’s MyHealthway Project last year, which aims to democratize access to medical records in hospitals for patients.
CMC has also developed a MyData viewer platform for its physicians.
Prof Choi also shared some AI and digital therapeutic projects in the pipeline in her presentation. This includes an AI-powered patient decision support system that will enable remote health management of patients with infectious diseases.
Through its digital health subsidiary, CMC is also working on DTx-based applications for smoking cessation, geriatric hearing loss, dementia and alcohol addiction.