Korea warns medical cloud

I read the news about medical cloud in Korea today.

According to this article, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has given a warning against medical cloud computing technology. It is possible that gathering personal information about the patients to upload them into cloud servers can violate the legislation about medical care. Korean law demands strict management of the information about patients to the hospitals. The ministry may doubt that medical cloud system can keep their information secret.

The comment of Ministry of Health and Welfare frightened the companies dealing with cloud technology.

Unfortunately, I could not find the news on the internet in English.

Cloud computing and data collection is quite collaborative to medicine.

In the past, a patient had to take a medical examination when he visited another hospital. If medical cloud were equipped, the new doctor could gain the past data of the patient examined in another hospital easily.

Nowadays, electronic image scans (e.g.. CT and MRI) are indispensable in clinical investigation. Medical cloud will enable a specialist who lives in a distance to look into the image files which is difficult to interpret instead to the doctor in charge.

Furthermore, utilizing a medical cloud data center, we perhaps can accomplish a massively large sized epidemiologic research. It will be helpful for the growth of medical science and public health.

However, the policy of dealing with personal information is a barrier for medical cloud system.

Actually, medical information is very sensitive. For a famous person like a politician, he strongly wants to hide his own information. If a terrorist gets the medical information of the president, it cause a crisis of the nation directly. Besides them, some information such as mental health or pregnancy is more delicate.

A new technology always has both pros and cons. I think that South Korea should aid the medical cloud system as a national policy. Korea has the fertile IT resource. It may be easy for Korea to create a national database of medical information. If Korea utilizes the new medical information system, it must be a great advantage.