The ministry of health and welfare of Korea as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have started to formulate ways to expand their bilateral cooperation when it comes to health insurance, medical informalization, and digital health in 2024 and beyond.
Notably, Korea’s health ministry and the ASEAN secretariat, as well as the Indonesian ministry of health, have agreed to promote comprehensive collaboration in the field of healthcare as a result of a meeting that took place in Jakarta early this month.
Besides progressing their partnership in healthcare IT and health insurance, the partners are also looking for feasible ways to work with the private sector when it comes to rolling out the collaborative projects.
These steps may have in them inviting the policymakers of ASEAN nations on industrial tours in Korea so as to train, deploy the local healthcare experts to the member nations’ ministries, and also offer support when it comes to launching the pilot systems.
As per the statement released by the Korean Health Ministry, the idea of Korea-ASEAN cooperation is not only based on putting forth Korean policies to ASEAN nations but also creating a framework that is apt for the target country based on the joint efforts of Korea and ASEAN so as to cope with the challenges that are faced by them.
Apparently, the April meeting will be followed by yet another high-level meeting, which will be held in June, where the talks are expected to conclude as far as the targeted rollout of new cooperation projects in 2024 is concerned. Nods from 10 ASEAN nations are expected to be there by the end of this year.
It is well to be noted that since 2021, there have been three ASEAN-Korea cooperation projects that have been established so far with the objective of seamless health security and universal healthcare.
Two of the projects, which happen to be the National Health Insurance Service, are aimed at helping ASEAN nations create a health insurance financial risk management system as well as a health insurance review and assessment service that will build a countrywide pharmaceutical information system for the entire region.