Junghwan Park was appointed director of the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Division of Healthcare Data Promotion in February 2026. In July, the organization was renamed the Division of Health AI and Data Policy, reflecting a wider mandate that joins medical-AI adoption and governance with the safe, useful circulation of health data. The formal remit spans national strategy and law, R&D and service deployment, data infrastructure and standardization, data-centric hospitals, and genomic-data use — including ministerial oversight of the National Integrated Bio Big Data Project.
The division's early-2026 work shows a deliberate progression from data to deployment. It expanded hospital-data vouchers from eight companies in 2025 to about forty in 2026, pairing medical-AI developers with data-centric hospitals; launched a separate testbed program to assess clinical value and operational efficiency in real care settings; and extended secure analysis through regional Medical Data Safe Use Centers. These instruments address three distinct bottlenecks — access to data, evidence from implementation, and a protected place to analyze sensitive records — rather than treating AI development as a single grant-making exercise.
On the care-delivery side, the division launched an end-to-end AI transformation program for chronic disease, covering everyday health behavior, primary-care decision support, referral and return-referral based on electronic records and medical images, and AI-supported remote collaboration. The referral pathway was prepared for implementation across three regional networks and connected to the Public Healthcare AI Highway. Consultations with national-university hospitals and frontline experts then fed these delivery lessons into the AI Basic Health Strategy, formally adopted in August 2026.
The data agenda combines access with trust. The fifth revision of the Healthcare Data Utilization Guideline introduced practical support for common data-review boards, deceased-person data, and risk-based review; the division backed this with field education. It also moved government health-policy publications toward licenses that permit commercial AI training with attribution, expanded K-CURE access to linked cancer clinical and public data, and grew the data-standards leading-hospital program from one to four institutions to test KR Core and interoperability in actual referral workflows.
These programs sit alongside the National Integrated Bio Big Data Project, the Healthcare Big Data Platform, data-centric hospitals, and longer-term work on medical foundation models, evaluation, safety, and guardrails. Together they define the portfolio as a health-system program: create governed data, make it usable, test AI where care is delivered, build shared infrastructure for regional adoption, and measure whether it improves access, quality, and continuity. International cooperation through APEC, WHO, and other partners connects that domestic implementation agenda to regional and global work.