Insung's remote healthcare makes bigger oversea foray, although stalled in Korea

Insung Information Co., a Korean telemedicine system developer, has penetrated fast into overseas markets, reaching out to 16 countries including the United States and Europe, while its smart healthcare system hardly sells in Korea due to the legal ban on remote doctoring.

Insung’s remote healthcare system exported under the brand name of Hicare Hub is mainly sold in the U.S. and Europe, and has been introduced to multiple countries including Italy and Southeast Asian countries for a pilot project, the company’s chief executive Won Jong-yoon told Maeil Business Newspaper.

Insung Information's remote medical system was selected for a project led by the US Department of Veterans Affairs. A total of 8,000 units have been exported to the department to facilitate comprehensive health and chronic disease management for 5,000 veterans across the U.S.

“Korea has made baby steps in telemedicine while others are galloping away,” said Won, stressing that “data is the most important thing down the road to realize true smart healthcare.”

And yet Korea has a fatal disadvantage in building up actual data from hospitals and clinics as telemedicine is not available, he said. If telemedicine is in place at least in the form of nurse intervention, Korea can advance into the next level by accumulating lots of experiences and data, he suggested.

The company’s mainstay Hicare Hub is designed to send data directly to a doctor in charge when a patient measures blood pressure, heart rate, or blood sugar at home.

The doctor in charge checks the patient's health with the data. When an abnormality signal is captured from the data, the doctor can ask the patient to take re-measurement through a video call.

The biggest strength of Hicare Hub is compatibility. Compatibility problems often arise when biomedical data measured by medical devices is sent to other devices because of different data sorting and transmission methods between device makers.

Hicare Hub is in sync with about 120 medical devices used around the world, so even if the medical devices send data in different ways, they are converted into international standards.

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