Naver and Seoul Hospital Unveil Medical LLM for Korean Healthcare Sovereignty

Seoul National University Hospital and Naver held a Medical AGI event to unveil KMed.ai, a large language model specialized for Korean healthcare. Courtesy of Seoul National University Hospital

Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and Naver have partnered to develop a large language model (LLM) specialized for the Korean medical field. This is significant as the model is optimized for the Korean healthcare environment, reflecting domestic medical laws and clinical guidelines, which can reduce reliance on foreign general-purpose AI.

On the 28th, SNUH and Naver held a ‘Medical Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)’ event at SNUH to unveil their jointly developed Korean medical-specific LLM, ‘KMed.ai’. KMed.ai is a model developed to reflect medical expressions used in actual clinical settings and domestic clinical standards, marking the first step toward establishing a Sovereign AI in the medical field.

Since this March, SNUH has been developing and verifying various functions of its own Korean medical LLM. KMed.ai is an advanced model that combines this initial development experience and professional feedback from medical staff with Naver’s AI technology. The collaboration between the two institutions has significantly improved KMed.ai’s clinical comprehension and accuracy, demonstrating its world-class specialized medical performance by scoring an average of 96.4 on the 2025 Korean Medical Licensing Examination (KMLE).

KMed.ai was designed to reflect the structure of the domestic healthcare system, including Korean medical laws and clinical guidelines. SNUH medical staff directly participated in the development process to precisely incorporate the medical language and clinical reasoning used in actual practice.

KMed.ai is a foundational model that will serve as the core engine for implementing future medical AGI. AGI refers to next-generation artificial intelligence capable of continuously understanding, reasoning, and making judgments across various medical tasks. KMed.ai is expected to play a central role in various clinical support functions, such as understanding medical records, medical reasoning, and connecting diagnostic workflows.

Separately from KMed.ai, SNUH is building a ‘medical-specialized agent platform’ to create an environment where hospital staff can enhance their work efficiency with AI assistance. At the event, functions for assisting with document creation based on Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and diagnostic support were demonstrated. SNUH plans to gradually implement these in actual clinical settings after obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals.

Hae-Jin Lee, Chairman of Naver, stated, “The medical-specialized LLM developed jointly by Naver and SNUH will protect the safest and most accurate data for medical staff, patients, and healthcare institutions, while enhancing the efficiency of medical professionals and patient satisfaction.” He added, “I hope this becomes a successful case of a medical sovereign AI that deeply understands Korea’s medical industry, clinical situations, and medical laws.”

Young-Tae Kim, President and CEO of Seoul National University Hospital, remarked, “Medical AI is a national strategic technology, and this achievement is a crucial first step and an important milestone in building Korea’s medical sovereign AI.” He continued, “SNUH will accelerate its transformation into an AI-based intelligent hospital to improve patient safety and the quality of medical services, and contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of Korea’s medical AI and its global expansion.”