Naver Corp and Kakao Corp, two of South Korea’s largest IT companies, shared novel applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare.
In HIMSS24 APAC panel session”,Tech Titans in Health: Naver and Kakao’s Role in Transforming Healthcare – Kakao Healthcare CEO Dr. Hwang Hee and Dr. Dongchul Cha, Director of the Center for Medical Innovation at NAVER Healthcare Lab, shared their organizations’ contributions to improving digital health in South Korea.
Dr. Hwang discussed potential solutions to optimize clinical data.
“There are so many options to choose from, but from a technology perspective, I think federated learning is a very promising and optimistic solution [data] hurdles.”
Given the unstructured nature of patient data, federated learning and AI training models for generating structured clinical data may be key, suggests Dr. Hwang.
“We can use conventional ones [natural language processing] NLP combined with [large language models] LLM for model training set. Kakao Healthcare developed and implemented automatic mapping to standardize the code for international needs [data management] standards.”
This process, he continued, could reduce human and economic resources by up to 70-80%.
Dr. Cha shared a similar process with Naver Healthcare Lab.
“[Naver] recently launched a symptom checker where users can view health symptoms and book appointments with doctors. The patient’s medical history would be integrated with the EMR, and time could be saved for both parties, he explained.
“Records will be converted automatically [into] clinically organized doctors’ notes. As a doctor, once I have the notes, I can proceed to the physical examination, which reduces my cognitive load.”
Dr. Cha emphasized the value of additional physician and specialist input in combating potential “AI hallucinations.”
“In order to verify all answers, we recruited a group of doctors and specialists [on the platform]. Using this approach has two benefits: users get verifiable answers, and irrelevant AI questions can be replaced with valuable questions from specialized clinicians.”
Such an innovation, Dr. Cha said, plays the role of a “doctor’s friend” who will always be at the patients’ disposal and, at the same time, will aid in practical improvement of medical potential.