The consortium of Theragen ETEX and Seoul National University (SNU) R&D Foundation said that it has begun full-scale development of the Healthcare Big Data Showcase Project after filing for an institutional review board deliberation on detailed tasks.
Building a healthcare big data showcase is the core of the Fourth Industrial Revolution-based healthcare development strategy promoted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Recently, the ministry selected SNU R&D Foundation and Teragen Etex Consortium as the leading project operators.
The project will lay the standardizing foundation to accumulate and utilize various healthcare data, including genomes, lifelogs, medical and examination records. It also aims to enhance the technological competitiveness of big data.
Five other institutions are also participating in the project -- Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, Kangbuk Samsung Hospital, Gangnam Severance Hospital and LG CNS.
The government will provide 2.3 billion won ($1.9 billion) to help finance the project in the first 10 months and extend the contract for two years, depending on the project’s progress.
The two lead players plan to recruit data providers from among cancer patients, other chronic patients, and the general public, as well as from public organizations, such as the National Health Insurance Service, Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, hospitals, and companies.
Based on the data, the consortium will build a healthcare big data showcase that can integrate healthcare data among the parties involved and make the most of national healthcare infrastructure that can cover all aspects of the field.
Primary business areas are laying the foundation for healthcare data collection, production, and management, collecting and producing healthcare datasets, and establishing a privacy model.
To this end, the consortium plans to develop guidelines and processes of international standards for data production, management and processing. They also will collect various data to produce a comprehensive healthcare dataset.
Specifically, the consortium will build digital virtual self-system, which is a digital medical device based on advanced data integration technology and security system, extracting and standardizing healthcare data through integrated modeling of clinical information and bio information.
“The consortium will secure a variety of source technologies by generating, collecting, accumulating, analyzing and utilizing healthcare big data, to expand the national health care base and create an institutional basis,” Theragen Etex CEO Hwang Tae-soon said.