Vice President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday urged government departments, medical firms and the private sector to make use of the National Health Insurance Administration’s (NHIA) big data to accelerate the development of smart and precision medicine.
Lai made the remark in Taipei yesterday at an NHIA conference, which showcased the work by 12 research teams that used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze National Health Insurance data.
NHIA Director-General Lee Po-chang (李伯璋) said that the administration in 2018 joined the Asia Silicon Valley Test Beds Project launched by the National Development Council to build a platform to develop AI technology using NHI data.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
After completing a process to strip identifying data from billions of lines of NHI medical records, a pilot project to build AI models from computerized tomography and magnetic resonance imaging images opened to applications in June last year, Lee said.
Fifteen research teams — nine from the medical field and six from academia, with 10 involving industry-academia partnerships — were approved for the project, he said.
Families have been impoverished due to illness or become ill due to poverty, so several hospitals worked to address the situation, Lai said.
However, what solved this social problem was the establishment of the NHIA in 1995 and cooperation from the medical field, he said.
In the past 25 years, the NHIA has protected health equity of people in Taiwan and achieved a satisfaction rate of more than 90 percent, the highest among all of the public policies the nation has ever implemented, he said.
To face the COVID-19 pandemic, the NHIA and healthcare professionals once again teamed up to protect people’s health, by serving as logistics headquarters and front-line guards, Lai said.
The NHIA applied its NHI data to help fight COVID-19 by tracing travel and contact histories, as well as facilitating the government’s mask rationing system, he said.
The NHIA has another important role: Cooperating with other government departments and the private sector to apply NHI big data — including about 65 billion medical record entries from the past 25 years and about 2.23 billion medical images taken since 2018 — to push forward smart and precision medicine in Taiwan, Lai said.
With research teams from the medical field and academia having joined the pilot project, many outstanding preliminary results have already been achieved, he said.
They should keep up the good work, he said, adding that the government’s job is to loosen regulations, offer more opportunities for experiments and ensure access to data.
Lee and Quanta Computer chairman Barry Lam (林百里) in March signed a memorandum of understanding, according to which Quanta Computer is to donate an integrated platform to the NHIA to build a customized environment to accelerate AI applications and the use of NHI data, the NHIA said.
NHIA chief secretary Yeh Feng-ming (葉逢明) said that the anonymized medical records of about 3.5 million non-natural people — or deceased individuals — have been uploaded to the platform, and companies can apply to use the data to build AI models to facilitate medical treatments, healthcare management and disease prevention.
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