Korea allowed telemedicine limitedly, but related technologies have so advanced that consumers can use them at any moment.

While most of the medical community has opposed remote healthcare, some doctors are increasingly voicing telemedicine's active use.

The Korea Telemedicine Society(KTS), founded and mainly led by professors at Seoul National University (SNU) College of Medicine, held an online symposium on “Telemedicine’s present and future” on Friday to show how much progress telemedicine technologies have made.

Telemedicine technologies have come to provide contactless patient care and lab data reading, diagnosis, and even treatment. Smart hospitals, remote imaging, remote rehabilitation, and artificial intelligence (AI)-using medical devices are already available. Hospitals are even considering using telemedicine in nursing, disease prevention, and nutrition, which do not seem to be related to telemedicine.

A company called Herings is developing digital therapeutics for cancer patients.

In radiology, which is free from telemedicine regulations, doctors used remote reading actively.

Kim Seong-hyun, director of the Human Medical Imaging & Intervention Center, said as the government allowed telemedicine between physicians, radiology was at the forefront of telemedicine with a long history – 30 years in the U.S. and 15 years in Korea.

“We are doing 10-15 percent of all radiology readings remotely. In Europe, it’s 50 percent. Radiology can be regarded as an indicator to predict the future of telemedicine,” Kim said.

SNU Bundang Hospital’s Rehabilitation Department said it would use a remote rehabilitation medical platform to collaborate with a regional hospital so that patients in provincial areas can receive rehabilitation treatment at the local hospital. The system is telemedicine between physicians, avoiding legal restrictions.

Still, Korea has a long way to go before fully implementing telemedicine because legal and regulatory limitations ban remote medical care between doctors and patients. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the obstacles on the surface.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare temporarily allowed doctors to provide patient counseling over the phone to avoid Covid-19 infection risks.

However, laws and regulations remained unchanged, leaving various issues at clinical scenes.

Song Seung-Jae, CEO of LifeSemantics, said the health and welfare ministry and the food and drug safety ministry have different views on non-face-to-face medical care.

While the health ministry said over-the-phone telemedicine could use Zoom or a phone as a tool, the food and drug safety ministry said tools should be limited to medical devices, he said.

Song said there were many things to consider to provide telemedicine services. LifeSemantics develops and provides a mediation solution program between Koreans living abroad and medical institutions.

Experts called for easing legal restrictions first. Park Sang-cheol, a professor at Seoul National University School of Law, said the temporary nod for telemedicine through phone calls made it difficult to attract proper investment and that the government should change the law.

Park claimed that the government should revise both the Medical Service Act and the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act to allow a drug courier delivery service.

“If a patient gets telemedicine care but has to visit a pharmacy near a university hospital because the drug courier delivery is impossible, he or she would be better to visit the hospital,” he said. “It is important to revise the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act.”

Park Hyeoun-ae, a nursing informatics professor at SNU, who was elected as the first president of the telemedicine society, said Korea has just begun taking baby steps with temporary telemedicine.

“It is now the time to identify the medical community’s demand and review introducing telemedicine fully,” she said. Not only physicians but experts in other industries have expressed concerns about delayed telemedicine.

However, the nation should address the problem of overcrowding at tertiary hospitals and protect patients' personal information first, she noted. “As a group of experts from companies, research labs, universities, and hospitals, we will seriously ponder upon which direction Korea’s telemedicine should go,” she added.