Kakao Healthcare teams up with US digital, biohealth firms

Kakao Healthcare, a digital healthcare platform unit of South Korea's Kakao Group, has teamed up with US digital and health companies such as DexCom, Google Cloud and Signature Healthcare to launch overseas businesses.

Kakao Healthcare announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with these companies on Thursday at the "Korea-US Digital and Biohealth Business Forum," hosted by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare in Boston.

DexCom, a world-leading company in the diabetes field with a market capitalization of $46 billion, will collaborate with Kakao HealthCare to combine their software and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) technology for domestic and international projects, providing innovative blood sugar management solutions.

Google Cloud, one of the best technology companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud fields, plans to collaborate with Kakao HealthCare by utilizing "federated learning," which uses AI to learn without aggregating individual institution data.

Based on technical cooperation with Google Cloud, Kakao HealthCare aims to implement precise medical care using medical institution data.

Signature Healthcare is a hospital group with more than 20 specialized psychiatric hospitals across the US. Recently, Signature Healthcare hospitals were included in a pilot project for remote patient monitoring (RPM) for mental health patients, for which the US government decided to expand subsidies.

These hospitals are planning to conduct the pilot project based on Kakao HealthCare's solution, which has progressed beyond the MOU stage to the point of signing a "major contract condition agreement."

"It is significant that, after about a year since the launch of Kakao HealthCare, we have taken the first step in digital healthcare overseas business by collaborating with global representative companies in each field," Hwang Hee, CEO of Kakao HealthCare, said. "We will launch our services in the market in the second half of this year and make efforts to achieve results in a short period of time."

Write to Ji-Hyun Lee at bluesky@hankyung.com