BUSAN — Busan has posted standout results in the use of pseudonymized data at the national level, again demonstrating systematic, data-driven administrative innovation. The city is credited with maximizing policy effectiveness by measuring, in multiple dimensions, whether policies actually reached welfare blind spots, rather than simply tallying administrative output.
The city said on the 1st that it won the top award, presented by the head of the organizing agency, in the best-practice category of the 2026 Pseudonymized Data Utilization Competition, co-hosted by the Personal Information Protection Commission and related ministries.
The winning entry was a study diagnosing health care service coverage based on the characteristics of users of Busan's medical buses. The city combined, in pseudonymized form, health information from users of its mobile medical bus program with benefit records held by the Korea Social Security Information Service, then analyzed users' social and economic characteristics, monthly usage patterns and the effects of policy support.
Data on medical bus use alone had made it difficult to grasp users' economic circumstances or social vulnerability. By combining data held by different institutions through pseudonymization, the city was able to determine more concretely which groups the medical services were concentrated on and how far they had reached their intended beneficiaries.
The analysis is significant in that it expanded the standard for evaluating health care policy from "how much was it used" to "who was reached." Moving away from assessments centered on simple output such as the number of visits, the city said it has laid a foundation for identifying welfare blind spots and reviewing program effectiveness by analyzing the characteristics of actual beneficiaries.
Underpinning the achievement is the Busan Pseudonymized Data Support Center. Opened in August 2022, the center provides infrastructure, consulting and training for the use of pseudonymized data, supporting data-driven administration in the region.
The city also won the top award last year for an analysis of spending patterns among visitors to Busan based on luxury hotel guests, giving it the honor for two consecutive years. Busan is building up cases that use pseudonymized data not merely as a means of protecting personal information but as an administrative tool for analyzing policy targets and outcomes.
"This case shows that pseudonymized data can be used beyond safely processing information — to identify policies that citizens need and to review their effects," said Yoon Jeong-no, the city's planning director. "We will expand data-driven administration using a wide range of data."
