'Public Medical Data' Opens Wide... Customized Insurance for Elderly and Rare Diseases Released

[Asia Economy Reporter Oh Hyung-gil] Insurance products that cover long-term dementia care insurance or rare diseases, which were difficult for elderly people to subscribe to, are expected to emerge. As six insurance companies are allowed to use domestic public medical data for product development research, it is anticipated that coverage will be expanded and premiums lowered for diseases that were previously not covered or had high premiums.

According to the insurance industry on the 10th, three life insurance companies?Samsung Life, Hanwha Life, and KB Life?and three non-life insurance companies?Samsung Fire & Marine, Meritz Fire & Marine, and KB Insurance?have received final approval from the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service (HIRA) to use public medical data.

Public medical data contains sensitive information such as medication, examinations, diseases, and treatments, and is pseudonymized so that individuals cannot be identified. To prevent personal information leakage, attempting to identify whose information it is can result in severe penalties such as criminal punishment.

Until now, domestic insurance companies found it difficult to utilize public medical data. In the October 2017 National Assembly audit of HIRA, concerns were raised that even pseudonymized data could be re-identified, exposing personal information, and that insurance companies might discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions in insurance subscriptions. As a result, HIRA suspended data provision.

Therefore, companies had to import foreign data for research and product development. However, some countries such as the United States and Japan have already been actively using public medical data to strengthen coverage for rare diseases.

In the United States, insurance companies have developed systems that predict high-risk patients for rare diseases such as abdominal aortic aneurysm through medical data analysis, enabling early treatment. In Japan, in response to aging, the government leads the opening of public medical data through the Japan Medical Data Center (JMDC). Finland has encrypted and opened nationwide medical information to foster industries such as healthcare and bio.

With the opening of the path to use HIRA’s public medical data, the insurance industry expects to research correlations of diseases suited to domestic circumstances and reflect domestic realities more accurately when setting insurance premiums. Additionally, the insurance industry is also in the process of applying to use public data from the National Health Insurance Service.

However, concerns about patient information leakage when insurance companies use public medical data will be strictly managed.

A financial regulatory official explained, "The insurance companies approved this time will not receive data directly from HIRA. Instead, pre-approved researchers will access HIRA’s closed network to analyze the data, and only statistical results will be exported after strict management."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.