The government regulation is the biggest hurdle for healthcare business but it could serve as another opportunity for growth, an expert said.

As legal and institutional systems tend to get behind state-of-the-art technologies, corporate officials and researchers should look for a new sector to broaden their boundaries of business, he said.

Lee Jong-yoon, a data scientist at Microsoft, shared his thoughts at a seminar on the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the future of hospitals during the “Digital Healthcare Fair 2018” at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, on Sunday.

“I heard a lot of medical professionals saying regulation is the most challenging issue. But despite the challenges, we can be more creative,” Lee said.

“Some painters deliberately put limits to use certain colors only, even though they apparently have no limit in space and tools to express themselves. Making a solution with limited resources could be more meaningful and creative than doing so with limitless resources.”

Lee noted that technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming more open to the public, unlike in the past when only experts had access to them.

“In the past, we needed many things such as data sets and servers to develop a system. But now, we have more possibilities with open data sets,” Lee said.

He took an example of a mobile application developed by a higher schooler that made headlines.

“Healthcare officials could become more creative than AI experts, under the difficulties of facing tough regulations,” he said.

If healthcare professionals have a brilliant idea about digital healthcare, they should overcome fear and take a small step forward to make the future path easier, Lee added.