The Primary Care Pilot Program Touches Professional Boundaries

The government’s Primary Care Innovation Pilot Program was designed to enable local clinics to continuously manage registered middle-aged and older patients, and it began by limiting eligibility to clinic-level medical institutions and selecting 100 sites in total. More than a simple support program, it is intended to test a family doctor-style care system centered on prevention and counseling, making the question of who should take responsibility for local primary care a core institutional issue.

The Korean medicine community’s strong backlash stems less from the size of the compensation itself than from concerns about where regional patients and National Health Insurance funds will flow in the future. Citing the fact that Korean medicine clinics had meaningful participation in an earlier primary care home-visit pilot program, they are demanding expanded eligibility, and this latest dispute can be seen as another example of a long-running inter-professional conflict resurfacing through reimbursement and program design.

External Herbal Dispensaries Caught Between Compounding and Manufacturing

The issue surrounding external herbal dispensaries lies in the fact that the current system was built on the premise of customized dispensing for individual patients, while actual operations are often closer to mass supply. As a result, doubts have grown over whether the current levels of safety control, quality control, and record-keeping are sufficient, and calls are gaining force to redefine the boundary between dispensing facilities and manufacturing facilities.

In particular, criticism that basic management mechanisms are inadequate—such as reporting changes in essential personnel, maintaining an appropriate dispensing scale, and keeping standardized prescriptions and dispensing records—goes beyond a simple professional turf conflict and raises issues of patient safety and industry trust. If the government wants to modernize the traditional Korean medicine industry and expand its export base, it must first redesign regulations in a more refined way to fit the nature of each type of facility.

Standardization of Medicinal Herbs and Korean Medicine Technologies Accelerates

Meanwhile, the trend toward stronger oversight is not limited to expanding regulation but is also leading to the adoption of standardization technologies. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety introduced an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) sensory inspection system as a support technology and built identification models for 297 medicinal herb items, marking a move to supplement quality verification procedures that had long depended heavily on the experience of skilled experts with a data-based approach.

At the international level as well, discussions on standards are progressing in areas such as genetic analysis of medicinal herbs, test methods for tongue diagnosis devices, and pulse diagnosis information. The fact that domestic research institutes have advanced five international standards to the next stage and will jointly lead three new international standards shows that the Korean medicine field is moving beyond preserving traditional knowledge toward competition over devices, data, and quality benchmarks.

Regions and Companies Move to the Next Stage of the Traditional Medicine Industry

At the regional level as well, the traditional medicine and natural products industries are shifting away from a structure centered on selling raw materials and toward research-driven and export-oriented industries. Geumsan is seeking to reinterpret ginseng as a bio and wellness resource through the 2029 Geumsan Expo, while the Saemangeum K-Herb Biocluster initiative aims to keep the entire supply chain within Korea, from the cultivation of medicinal crops to processing and commercialization.

These changes can be read as a strategic realignment to respond to slowing consumption, import dependence, and intensifying industrial competition. Ultimately, the challenge for the traditional medicine and natural products sectors is no longer just to emphasize tradition itself, but to establish the institutions, quality standards, and production infrastructure needed to secure trust within a modern industrial system.