Korea holds rich national health datasets, but their value is limited when surveillance, insurance, cancer, and other records remain in institutional silos. In March 2017, a public–private Health and Medical Big Data Task Force began building a national strategy through five workstreams: governance, services, data linkage, privacy and technology, and public communication. Junghwan Park's work during 2017–2020 followed that policy from initial design through public deliberation and implementation.
The process was intentionally staged. A strategy conference brought data holders, clinicians, researchers, information-security experts, and civil society into the discussion; an online policy consultation opened the proposed pilot to public comment; and an advisory structure reviewed research purpose, public value, linkage, and protection. The pilot began in 2018, testing whether data held separately by national institutions could be connected for public-interest research without turning the platform into an unrestricted data repository.
The Healthcare Big Data Platform formally opened in September 2019, initially linking the National Health Insurance Service, the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, the disease-control agency, and the National Cancer Center. Its functions covered research proposals and applications, discovery of available data, cross-agency linkage, and de-identification. The operating platform later expanded to additional national bodies and university hospitals, turning a policy experiment into standing research infrastructure.
The platform's design reflects the central tension of health data: it must enable useful analysis while protecting sensitive records. Applications undergo review, linked data is used within controlled environments, and distributed research methods can return analytic results without moving underlying records. The same infrastructure proved adaptable during COVID-19, when claims-based clinical data was opened to researchers and an expert group advised on additional linkage and research support.
Park's contribution was to help build the institutional pathway, not merely the website: public agenda-setting, governance, privacy safeguards, cross-agency agreements, and an operating route for researchers. The platform developed alongside his work on health-data de-identification and the first national bio-big-data pilot, creating part of the foundation on which later cancer, genomics, and medical-AI programs now operate.