South Korea invested about 4 trillion won in bio data projects last year, but spending on linking and sharing data between institutions accounted for only about 4% of the total.
Twelve ministries and agencies, including the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, invested a combined 3.9009 trillion won in 505 bio data projects last year, according to the final report on health care data projects released by the National Bio Innovation Committee on the 6th.
The researchers divided the process of bringing data into actual research and industrial use into six stages — generation and collection, processing and refinement, aggregation and management, linkage, sharing and opening, analysis, and utilization — and analyzed investment at each stage.
Based on the main investment stage of each project, 979.8 billion won, or 25.1%, went to analysis and 975.9 billion won, or 25.0%, to utilization. The two stages together absorbed about half of all investment.
By contrast, linkage, sharing and opening — which connects data across institutions and allows outside researchers and companies to use it — received only 163.1 billion won, or 4.2%. Processing and refinement, which covers data standardization and quality control, drew just 7.6 billion won, or 0.2% of the total.
That shortage of investment in data linkage is cited as the biggest obstacle to connecting and using bio data across institutions. Even for the same disease or test data, variable definitions, units and coding systems differ, so a separate round of refinement and conversion is needed before another institution can use the data. Of 229 datasets the researchers analyzed separately, 93 applied a model defined by the project itself, the largest group, according to the committee's report. Another 77 were kept in raw form without any standardization. Only 15 applied an internationally recognized standard model, and none used a domestic public standard model.
The report said the common foundation should be strengthened so that existing data can move through standardization, refinement, linkage and sharing into actual use, rather than focusing on producing more new data. Based on the final findings, the committee plans to draw up policy tasks covering health care data linkage, improved procedures for providing and using data, standardization and quality control, and to make policy recommendations for related projects.
