Government Unveils AI Basic Healthcare Strategy to Build ‘AI Highway’ Linking Hospitals Nationwide

The government has announced a comprehensive, cross-government plan to use artificial intelligence (AI) to address gaps in regional and essential health care and accelerate drug development.

Relevant ministries jointly unveiled the “AI Basic Healthcare Strategy” at a national policy coordination meeting on the 6th, with the vision “AI That Saves Lives, Medical Innovation for All.” The strategy identifies AI as a game changer for overcoming the structural crisis facing the current health care system and aims to deliver medical innovation that people can experience directly.

The government will first establish a “public health care AI highway” linking public hospitals nationwide with cutting-edge AI. It aims to connect all 72 regional and local responsible medical institutions by 2029, beginning with nine hospitals in the second half of 2026. This will enable regional public hospitals to provide advanced AI-enabled medical services at the level of major hospitals in the Seoul metropolitan area.

The public health care AI platform will include various AI solutions, such as imaging interpretation assistance, automated medical record generation and 24-hour patient monitoring. The government plans to provide computing resources, including the necessary GPUs (graphics processing units), to reduce the investment burden on individual hospitals.

A “K-AI drug development platform” will also be established to accelerate drug development for rare and difficult-to-treat diseases. The platform will use national GPUs to support companies in designing clinical data and conducting AI analyses. In particular, a shared, isolated, high-performance integrated-use platform based on multimodal data will support the entire drug development process, from protein structure prediction to virtual screening of candidate compounds.

To support this effort, the government will build a “national integrated biobank” containing data from 1 million people by 2032. The large-scale dataset will combine clinical, genomic and public data, with data from 120,000 people to be made available first in November 2026. The plan is to use these data to develop “sovereign medical AI” tailored to the Korean population.

The government will establish a “national health care data hub” to enable the use of fragmented health care data in one place and shorten the data provision period from the current 180 days to within 90 days. It also plans to rationalize data-related regulations, including exempting research using deidentified pseudonymized data from review by institutional review boards (IRBs).

An “appropriate AX reimbursement” system will also be established to evaluate and reward the outcomes of AI adoption in health care. In addition to the existing fee-for-service system, the government plans to provide performance-based differential payments to health care institutions that improve patient benefits through AI adoption, encouraging voluntary use of AI in clinical practice.