How Catholic Medical Center achieved personalised care with big data, AI

Within two years of digital transformation, Catholic Medical Center, one of the largest medical institutions in South Korea, gained capabilities to provide personalised care powered by big data and AI.

In-Young Choi, professor and head of the Catholic Information Convergence Institute at CMC, shared their journey in the session, “Personalised care with hospital big data and digital health technology.”

CMC began transitioning its eight affiliate hospitals, including the flagship Seoul St Mary’s Hospital, to “IT-specialised institutes” or smart hospitals in 2021. 

To facilitate this transformation, the Catholic Information Convergence Institution (CICI) was born. 

Through the CICI, which has three divisions focused on EMR, big data, and AI, CMC developed a seven-year roadmap for big data. This includes the development of the nuCDW, its clinical data warehouse that integrates and anonymises all data across CMC hospitals.

Aside from facilitating big data analysis, the nuCDW, which hosts 1.7 petabytes of data from 15 million patients, also enables the organisation’s development of in-house AI. 

Big data and AI-powered digital solutions

With big data and AI, CMC has built various digital solutions to support clinician’s provision of personalised care.

A prime example is its mobile patient application. It features wide-ranging outpatient and inpatient services, from booking appointments, navigating the hospital, and accessing wait status and hospitalisation information to selecting meals and payment. 

CMC has also set up mobile kiosks for patient registration and for collecting and accessing patient-reported outcomes. 

To allow patients to conveniently access their health data anywhere, CMC also created the MyData platform. 

The patient data portal was borne out of the organisation’s involvement with the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s MyHealthway Project last year, which aims to democratise access to medical records across hospitals for patients. 

CMC has also developed a MyData viewer platform for its clinicians. 

Prof Choi also shared in her presentation some AI and digital therapeutics projects in their pipeline. This includes an AI-powered patient decision support system, which will enable remote health management of infectious disease patients. 

Through its digital health subsidiary, CMC is also working on DTx-based applications for smoking cessation, geriatric hearing loss, dementia, and alcohol addiction.