Indexed in SCIE, Scopus, PubMed & PMC
pISSN 1226-4512 eISSN 2093-3827

Article

home Article View

Review Article

Korean J Physiol Pharmacol 2019; 23(5): 311-315

Published online September 1, 2019 https://doi.org/10.4196/kjpp.2019.23.5.311

Copyright © Korean J Physiol Pharmacol.

Current status and future direction of digital health in Korea

Soo-Yong Shin1,2,*

1Department of Digital Health, Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences & Technology, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul 06351, 2Big Data Research Center, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul 06351, Korea

Correspondence to:*Soo-Yong Shin, E-mail: sy.shin@skku.edu

Received: July 10, 2019; Revised: August 2, 2019; Accepted: August 7, 2019

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Recently, digital health has gained the attention of physicians, patients, and healthcare industries. Digital health, a broad umbrella term, can be defined as an emerging health area that uses brand new digital or medical technologies involving genomics, big data, wearables, mobile applications, and artificial intelligence. Digital health has been highlighted as a way of realizing precision medicine, and in addition is expected to become synonymous with health itself with the rapid digitization of all health-related data. In this article, we first define digital health by reviewing the diverse range of definitions among academia and government agencies. Based on these definitions, we then review the current status of digital health, mainly in Korea, suggest points that are missing from the discussion or ought to be added, and provide future directions of digital health in clinical practice by pointing out certain key points.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, Digital health, eHealth, Government regulation, Mobile health