Naver Corp and Kakao Corp, two of South Korea's biggest IT companies, have shared innovative uses of AI in healthcare.

In the 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, head of the Medical Innovation Centre at NAVER Healthcare Lab, shared their organisation’s respective contributions in advancing digital health in South Korea.

Dr Hwang discussed potential solutions aimed at clinical data optimisation. 

"There are so many options to choose from, but from the perspective of the technology, I think, federated learning is a very promising and optimistic solution to address [data] hurdles."     

Given the unstructured nature of patient data, federated learning and training AI models for generating structured clinical data may hold key, Dr Hwang suggested.

"We can use conventional [natural language processing] NLP combined with [large language models] LLM for the model training set. Kakao Healthcare developed and deployed automapping for standardising code for international [data management] standards."     

This process, he continued, could reduce human and economic resources by up to 70%-80%.      

Dr Cha shared a similar process at Naver Healthcare Lab.     

"[Naver] recently launched a symptom checker where users can view health symptoms and make reservations with the doctors. The patient’s medical history would be integrated with the EMR, and both parties can save time," he explained.  

"Records will be automatically transformed [into] clinically arranged doctors' notes. I, as a doctor, can move on to physical examination after gaining the notes, reducing my cognitive burden."     

Dr Cha stressed the value of additional physician and specialist input in combating potential "AI hallucinations."

"We recruited a group of physicians and specialists to verify all answers [on the platform]. There are two benefits to using this approach: users get verifiable answers, and irrelevant AI questions can be replaced with valuable questions phrased by specialist clinicians."

Such innovation, Dr Cha said, serves as a "doctor friend" that will always be there for the patients, all while helping virtually raise medical capacities.