Major South Korean Hospital to Use Blockchain Tech for Medical Information Services

One of the South Korea's largest hospitals has partnered with a local tech company to develop a medical services platform based on blockchain technology, according to the hospital's official press release Nov. 12.Myongji Hospital, located in the city of Goyang, South Korea, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Korean IT company BICube, which markets itself as a machine learning platform.

The two parties plan to use blockchain technology to create a healthcare information exchange system.

According to the hospital's release, the aim of the project 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 will allow patients to share sensitive medical data with other medical institutions upon authorization, without the data being stored centrally.

According to the release, the two parties plan to commercialize the service by 2019.In September of this year, the Korea Internet and Security Agency and the Ministry of Science and ICT announced plans to expand their public blockchain pilot program from six to twelve projects and spend about $9 million to spread blockchain throughout public and private sectors.

Later, the Korean government announced that it would invest $35 million in next year's budget to develop blockchain technology, tripling the previous budget for the industry, Cointelegraph reported Nov. 8.This week, the Austrian government announced plans to support a U.K.-based cancer research company using blockchain to detect the disease.