Myongji Hospital has collaborated with a local tech company to work on a medical services platform based on blockchain technology.

 

This is according to the hospital’s official press release, which was released earlier this week.

Myongji Hospital, one of South Korea’s largest hospitals and located in the city of Goyang, has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Korean IT company BICube, which is touted to be a machine learning platform.

 

The two entities plan to utilize blockchain technology to generate a healthcare information exchange system. According to the hospital’s release, the goal of the endeavor is to “build a hybrid cloud [platform] that combines a public cloud and a private cloud.”

The medical information exchange service’s hybrid cloud functionality would actually let patients share sensitive medical data with other medical institutions upon authorization, without the data being kept in a central locale.

 

The release also indicated that the two parties hold plans to commercialize the service by next year.

Earlier this year, the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) and the Ministry of Science and ICT divulged plans to expand their public blockchain pilot program from six to twelve projects and devote an estimated $9 million to endorse blockchain throughout public and private sectors.

The Korean government also disclosed that it would put in $35 million in next year’s budget to develop blockchain technology, thereby tripling the previous budget for the industry.