Higher Review Threshold for Automobile Insurance

Starting in October, the review of herbal decoctions and pharmacopuncture under automobile insurance will be expanded to cover a broader group of patients with minor injuries, and patients with mild injuries who wish to continue treatment beyond eight weeks will need to undergo a separate assessment. Until now, the legally defined scope of minor-injury patients and the scope actually applied in reviews had been out of sync, so even injuries of the same severity were managed with different levels of scrutiny depending on the diagnosis name. This adjustment is largely intended to reduce that gap.

Behind this change is the concern that long-term treatment and the practice of claiming future treatment costs have led to higher automobile insurance loss ratios and greater premium burdens. As a result, patients and medical institutions will need to explain the necessity of treatment in a more structured manner, and the insurance system will shift its focus from simple reimbursement toward appropriateness management.

Accelerating Standardization of the Korean Medicine Sector

The systems for herbal medicine manufacturing and approval are also rapidly shifting away from traditional practice-centered approaches toward standardization and modernization. The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety has revised the definition of standard decoctions to bring modern extraction equipment into the institutional framework, and through revisions to the regulations on item approval and notification for herbal medicinal products (crude drug preparations), etc., it is also refining submission materials and review criteria to better fit product characteristics.

This trend is seen not so much as simple deregulation, but as an effort to secure both quality consistency and industrial competitiveness. In particular, as shown by efforts such as securing propagation technology for medicinal herbs that had been previously imported entirely from China, attempts are continuing to shift the supply chain toward domestic research and production. This suggests that the Korean medicine sector has entered a stage of restructuring its industrial system from raw materials to manufacturing and approval.

Korean Medicine Use Reorganized Around Evidence and Data

Korean medicine is moving beyond perception indicators such as user experience and satisfaction toward a stage in which its actual safety and patterns of use are demonstrated through numbers. A national statistical survey targeting 6,000 adults and a safety study tracking 186 postpartum women reflect efforts to place policy decisions and clinical use not on anecdotes, but on accumulated data.

With the addition of AI and the standardization of medical information, predicting the risks of combining herbal and conventional medicines, building real-world data, and linking with digital healthcare have emerged as new tasks. This represents a shift away from keeping Korean medicine as a separate domain and toward making it explainable and comparable within the broader healthcare system, with significance for creating a common language for insurance, clinical practice, and industrialization in the future.

The Korean Medicine Industry Expands Beyond the Treatment Setting

Stakeholders related to Korean medicine are broadening their activities beyond service competition inside clinics into education, exports, and regional industry. Wonkwang University’s operation of a joint undergraduate program with two national universities in Mongolia, and the Jinan-gun cluster’s final completion of CPNP registration, are examples of reconfiguring Korean medicine and natural resources as assets for international cooperation and overseas market expansion.

This expansion is tied to the view that growth potential is limited if relying on the domestic market alone. However, as the industry’s reach expands, it will also face stricter demands regarding efficacy, safety, and quality control standards, making clear that the earlier institutional reforms and accumulation of data are prerequisites for growth in exports and education.