Naver to tap AI, Kakao to utilize platform to push for digital healthcare biz

Naver and Kakao, the two online platform giants, choose different strategies to tap the global digital healthcare market.

At the “Health On” conference on Wednesday, Naver and Kakao presented their blueprints for the digital healthcare business. From each side, doctor-turned executives gave their presentations.

Naver emphasized a strategy to use cutting-edge AI technologies to provide medical solutions.

Rha Koon-ho, director of Naver Healthcare Research Institute, introduced a healthcare solution that the institute developed jointly with Naver’s AI tech team CLOVA.

The solution focuses on linking patients with physicians and raising work efficiency for doctors. It also aims to provide remote health management solutions.

“To enter the global healthcare market, Naver plans to focus on AI-based technologies. We’re conducting a top-tier study through supercomputers,” Rha said. “We will use technologies related to robots, automated logistics system, and 5G internally first and provide them for others later.”

Smart Survey is an automated questionnaire system to check medical history about physical symptoms and mental health. When a Naver employee records symptoms with the ERP, the information goes directly into the cloud EMR of the in-house physicians.

PT Summary manages health checkup results and offers follow-up and consultation content if abnormal results come out. It can easily classify vast medical records using Naver's OCR (optical character reader) technology.

Naver is also in a pilot run of VOICE EMR, which automates the entry of nursing records based on Naver's AI voice recognition service, Clova Note.

“We will keep searching for ways to help healthcare providers with technology so that medical consumers can benefit from it,” Rha said.

Kakao plans to utilize its high accessibility based on its massive platform to provide health-related services.

Hwang Hee, CEO of Kakao Healthcare CIC, said Kakao had a 4.5 million active user platform to introduce quality services quickly.

Using Kakao’s business-to-consumer service, Kakao will grow Virtual Care and Data Enabler platforms, Hwang said. Kakao will be “a company for everyone” that uses healthcare data.

“Kakao alone cannot achieve the platform that we want to implement. Kakao intends to make a ‘backbone’ platform, or an ecosystem, to provide people, doctors, and companies opportunities to freely access and meet,” Hwang explained.

Kakao aims to help patients take control of health data and enjoy customized medical services centered on the prevention of diseases, he went on to say.

“We will build an ecosystem where startups and healthcare companies, which could not grab a chance to grow, can meet with users in the domestic market,” he said.

Kakao will also support technology for hospitals, under increasing pressure to make massive investments in line with technology advancement to realize “interoperability,” he emphasized.