Korea holds some of the world's richest national health datasets, but their value is limited when they remain in separate institutional silos. Public-health surveillance, nationwide insurance claims, cancer-registry records, and vital statistics each answer different questions, and the hardest research and policy problems require linking them. From 2017 to 2020, Junghwan Park established the National Medical Big Data Linkage Platform to connect these national centers — originally the disease-control agency, the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA), and the Cancer Registry — so that health, claims, and cancer data could be analyzed together rather than in isolation.
That linkage initiative has since grown into the operating Healthcare Big Data Integrated Platform (보건의료 빅데이터 통합 플랫폼). Under the Ministry of Health and Welfare, it now connects a wider set of national bodies — the Disease Control and Prevention Agency, the National Health Insurance Service, HIRA, the National Cancer Center, Statistics Korea, and the National Medical Center, alongside participating university hospitals — turning a cross-agency linkage idea into standing national research infrastructure.
The platform's design reflects the central tension of health data: it must enable research while protecting deeply sensitive records. Researchers do not receive raw data. Applications pass through an integrated pre-review and deliberation process before any data is provided, and a distributed research network converts each institution's data into a common model and returns only analysis results rather than the underlying records. A browsable data catalog and visualization layer let researchers see what is available before requesting it. The result is a system in which linkage and privacy coexist by construction.
Park's contribution was foundational: establishing the linkage platform that made cross-agency analysis possible in the first place, during the same years he led the drafting of Korea's first health-information de-identification guideline — the privacy methodology that makes such linkage defensible. Linked national health data of this kind underpins precision medicine, health-services research, and evidence-based policy, and it is the backbone on which later initiatives, including the country's genomics and precision-medicine programs, draw.