National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) Director General Lee Po-Chang on March 24 inked a memorandum of understanding with Quanta Computer Chairman Barry Lam, which specifies that Quanta Computer will donate an specially customized artificial intelligence-powered (AI) cloud computing platform to help the National Health Insurance (NHI) system build a computing environment that is conducive towards gleaning value-added insights and speed up the development of AI applications from patient data. Director General Lee said that since June 2019, the NHIA began accepting applications to develop AI applications for medical imaging, which has attracted applications by 17 teams in the past six months. If adopted in clinical treatments, the AI applications would greatly boost the development of precision medicine.

The NHIA said that in the 25 years since the NHI’s founding in 1995, the medical dataset has been growing by around 850 million entries each year and has become the only national-level medical imaging database of the world.

In the future, the NHIA will work towards the systematic collection of data on specific diseases to build thematic databases, such as for lung cancer and breast cancer, among others. The data to be analyzed by AI include both forward- looking forecasts on diseases as well as retrospective studies that can be built into high quality databases for industries and the academic and medical communities. It is hoped that smart AI modules can be created to cater to the diagnostic and health prediction needs of the Taiwan people.

To attract top multinational biotechnology companies to establish joint-research and development centers in Taiwan to gain synergies through collaboration. The Cabinet’s Bio Taiwan Committee also urged the government to provide incentives to boost efficiencies of clinical trials, building biological databases, as well as improving administrative efficiencies, providing tax incentives and lowering the frequency of drug price adjustments.

[2020-03-25 / DIGITIMES]