Privately-led cooperation between the industry and academia to innovate the domestic digital healthcare sector has borne fruits.

Yonsei University Health System (YUHS) signed the “agreement for the joint research of Korean-model digital healthcare” with the representatives of 10 domestic IT companies Wednesday, hospital officials said.

The 10 companies possess superior technology or have made remarkable accomplishment in digital healthcare sector -- Microsoft Korea, DS Trade, Iam Cloud, Sensor Way, Base Korea IC, Finger N, Selvas Al, Mazel One, J-US and DNA Link.

Yoon Do-heum, president and CEO of YUHS, noted that advanced countries are taking the technological lead through active industry-academy cooperation in the face of the fourth industrial revolution marked by the fusion of information and communication and state-of-the-art technology, and said Severance Hospital would take center stage of such cooperation.

"Many domestic digital healthcare companies are having a hard time applying and expanding developed technologies and are burying them because of difficulties finding proper cooperative links with universities and hospitals,” Yoon said. “Under the slogan of ‘Start-up Severance 100,’ we will open our data, research workforce and clinical application capacity and share them with up to 100 cooperative companies turning it into a network of joint research between the industry and academia.”

Koh Soon-dong, CEO of Microsoft Korea, said on behalf of the businesses side, “In the era of the fourth Industrial Revolution, it is significant that we will conduct joint research with YUHS and solve medical difficulties through the convergence of healthcare and IT. Microsoft Korea will provide a variety of technologies and IT infrastructures to companies participating in the joint research and will actively support digital transformations in the domestic healthcare field.”

Under this agreement, Yonsei University faculty members and every business will establish a system to diagnose and prevent major diseases such as cardiovascular, diabetes, and asthma using the pre-coordinated medical big data, and ultimately, to develop intelligence.