Korea's government formally adopted the AI Basic Health Strategy (AI 기본의료 전략) at the National Policy Coordination Meeting chaired by the Prime Minister on 6 August 2026. Developed across the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the National AI Strategy Committee, the Ministry of Science and ICT, and other agencies, the plan is designed to make AI-enabled care available beyond major hospitals and use it to help close gaps in regional, essential, and public healthcare. Junghwan Park led the ministry team of policy planners and engineers that developed the framework.
The first strategy brings AI into services people encounter directly. It provides AI support packages for public-health centers and primary-care clinics in underserved areas, pilots AI-assisted remote collaboration for home visits on islands and in remote communities, and develops an integrated emergency AI platform to support ambulance transport and hospital selection in real time. It also calls for a citizen-facing AI health assistant, exchange of clinical records and medical images through personal health records, AI-enabled drug discovery, and staged access to the National Integrated Bio Big Data resource.
The second strategy builds a nationwide digital foundation. A public-medical AI platform will connect all 72 regional and local accountable-care hospitals through a "Public Healthcare AI Highway," beginning with nine pilot institutions in the second half of 2026, expanding to 30 in 2027, and reaching all 72 by 2029. The plan also introduces AI-native hospitals, modernizes information systems in regional public hospitals, creates a national health-data hub, and begins development of Korean sovereign medical AI based on domestic clinical data and independent AI models in 2027.
The third strategy addresses the conditions needed for adoption: appropriate payment for AI-enabled services; stronger R&D capacity at regional national-university hospitals; medical-AI ethics and health-data security guidelines; development and recruitment of AI and biohealth talent; and international cooperation, including a proposed WHO AI hub in Korea. These measures position deployment, data, safety, workforce, and industry as parts of one health-system transformation rather than separate technology projects.
The strategy grew out of implementation work already under way in early 2026: consultation with national-university hospitals, a chronic-disease AX sprint spanning home, primary care, referral, imaging, and remote collaboration, and preparation of AI-enabled referral networks for public hospitals. The adopted framework therefore connects several strands of Park's policy work — health-data infrastructure, the National Integrated Bio Big Data Project, privacy and governance, medical AI, and international cooperation — while giving those pilots a national route to scale.