As Korea and Finland celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relations on Thursday, healthcare representatives from both countries highlighted the need to establish stronger ties in the areas of health tech and innovation.

Helsinki Partners hosted a Healthtech Seminar in Insadong, Seoul on Thursday where Health Capital Helsinki Director Juha Paakkola introduced the Finish ecosystem and Huniverse Global CEO Lee Sang-heon spoke about the Korean-Finnish Collaboration in Healthcare based on his experience with Finnish hospitals.

Both highlighted the power of technology to alleviate mutual problems that both countries face with respect to aging societies and mental health.

For example, he highlighted Finnish start-up, Koite Health, which is an antibacterial mouthwash solution with an LED patented light technology to make oral healthcare more convenient.

Paakkola presented the Finnish Health ecosystem as a fertile ground for healthcare start-ups, referencing its recent conference in May called Radical Health Festival Helsinki and its upcoming tech conference in November called Slush. In particular, he noted Finnish health data consisting of biobank data from FinBioBank which is supported by its Findata biobank act and secondary use of health data act. It also has a wide range of healthcare data with health register data from Kanta and hospital data lakes as well as social and healthcare databases facilitating an enabling environment for healthcare research and development. 

Paakola also pointed to the European Innovation Scoreboard 2023 which showcased Finland as an innovation leader among EU countries, emphasizing Finland as an entry point for Korean healthcare start-ups. 

As Huniverse is collaborating with Finnish hospitals to deliver smart hospital solutions with its cloud-based hospital information system (HIS), Huniverse Global CEO Lee Sang-heon also advocated for Finland partnerships.

In this regard, he also spoke about how his company is currently engaged in a three way partnership with Korea University Hospital and Naver Cloud to improve our HIS solution by incorporating Naver's HyperClova, the Korean ChatGPT equivalent.  

'We hope to launch this in the next three years to allow the language learning model to learn on big data from hospitals to enable precision-based medicine," Lee said.