Conflicting signals within the same field

Local governments and the medical community are moving to expand support for postpartum recovery. Suwon’s broader postpartum support shows a trend toward incorporating Korean medicine treatment into birth-friendly policy, and in practice, a safety study tracking 186 postpartum women, though limited, is helping strengthen the evidence for its use.

By contrast, stricter standards are being applied to cost control and the appropriateness of coverage. Auto insurance medical expenses reached 1.5057 trillion won, fueling controversy over the overuse of Korean medicine treatment, and courts also made clear the boundaries of institutional reimbursement by refusing to recognize National Health Insurance claims for herbal preparations sold without a prescription.

A policy environment where standards and oversight come first

At the manufacturing stage, industrial promotion and tighter management are advancing at the same time. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety’s move into discussions on customized GMP means it intends to reflect the characteristics of herbal preparations while further refining quality control standards, while the case involving 8.4 tons of illegal herbal materials shows why gaps in the licensing and oversight system can no longer be left unaddressed.

On the international stage as well, Korea is moving beyond simple participation toward helping design standards. Being entrusted with research to develop traditional medicine clinical guidelines based on completed consultations with the WHO, along with leading approval of the APEC Healthy Aging Action Plan 2026–2030, indicates that Korea’s institutional operating experience, including Korean medicine and digital health, is being connected to discussions on international standards.

How AI is changing the way care and production are carried out

Technological change is targeting standardization and predictability, long pointed to as the weakest links in Korean medicine. A case in which the time required to prepare herbal medicine, once about five hours, was greatly reduced through automation signals a shift in production processes toward an industrial system, while predictive models such as Meta-HDI are attempts to manage, on a data-driven basis, the uncertainty involved in combining herbal and conventional medicines.

For this trend to continue, people’s ability to use the technology matters more than simply introducing equipment. The problem of insufficient AI utilization capability raised in the education sector applies equally to healthcare and Korean medicine, and going forward, the gap between personnel who can use these technologies and institutions that cannot is likely to translate into differences in service quality and safety.

Why this has become a turning point now

These changes are appearing all at once because aging, regional healthcare gaps, pressure on insurance finances, and digital transformation have converged at the same moment. Even systems the government loosened to fill medical service gaps ended up flowing toward work in Korean medicine hospitals and long-term care hospitals, so policy is now moving beyond simple support to a stage where it weighs actual outcomes together with side effects.

Ultimately, Korean medicine is not entering a phase where it must choose only one of expansion or control. Rather, it is being reorganized so that areas backed by evidence move more deeply into the system, while unclear areas face stronger scrutiny. This change demands standardization and accountability from the industry, while requiring a new balance for patients and subscribers between broader access and managing cost burdens.