Insomnia, panic disorder, and depression are mental illnesses that can be managed and treated. If we say a score of 80 means a condition is treated, medication scores 70 and the remaining 10 is filled by digital therapeutics (DTx). Even when patients are not at the hospital, digital therapeutics makes management easy and consistent.
On 1st at Yongin Severance Hospital in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, psychiatry professor Park Jin-young (48) said, Digital therapeutics meaningfully bridges home and hospital, filling the gaps that medication alone cannot cover.
Park graduated from Yonsei University College of Medicine and earned her master's and doctoral degrees at the same university. After completing her residency at Severance Hospital, she has been practicing as a psychiatrist specializing in panic disorder, depression, insomnia, and geriatric mental health.
According to the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service (HIRA), the number of insomnia patients in Korea last year was about 800,000, with 1 in 3 adults experiencing it. Patients with panic disorder and anxiety disorder also exceeded 900,000, and both increased more than 20% from 2020. Park emphasized, If medication and digital therapeutics are used together, treatment outcomes can be improved.
Digital therapeutics are software medical devices that prevent, manage, or treat medical disabilities or diseases, provided in the form of apps (applications) or games rather than pills or injections. They are used broadly across disease treatment, management, and prevention, including cognitive behavioral therapy; central nervous system and neuromuscular disorders; prognosis management for severe patients; chronic disease management; prevention of heart failure recurrence; and even diabetes prevention.
Park said, If a mental illness is not severe with a high risk of self-harm, it can be managed like diabetes or hypertension, allowing daily life to continue, adding, It is practically difficult to see a doctor every week to check prognosis, so adjunctive therapy using IT (information technology) is necessary.
Korea's first digital therapeutic was Somz, an insomnia cognition-improvement therapeutic by Aimmed approved by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety in March 2023. Since then, seven products have been approved in succession, including Welt's insomnia cognition-improvement therapeutic SleepQ, Neurive's tinnitus therapeutic SoriCLEAR, Neofaps' stroke visual field defect improvement therapeutic VIVID Brain, Share&Service's respiratory rehabilitation exercise therapeutic EasyBreath, Hi's anxiety disorder therapeutic Anxirex, and Emocog's mild cognitive impairment therapeutic CogTera.
However, receiving approval does not mean a doctor can immediately prescribe it. Currently, only four digital therapeutics can be prescribed in actual clinical settings: Somz, SleepQ, VIVID Brain, and CogTera, and the number of hospitals that can prescribe them nationwide is only a handful. This is because each hospital's computer and prescribing systems differ, making integration difficult. Low reimbursement (the fee provided by health insurance) and the lack of familiarity among both doctors and patients are also obstacles.
Yongin Severance Hospital has played a leading role in prescribing digital therapeutics. In February last year, it began prescribing Somz to older adults with insomnia, and in June it started prescribing SleepQ. Nearly a quarter of the prescriptions nationwide (fewer than 200) came from this hospital.
Park said, To prescribe digital therapeutics, hospital infrastructure and physician commitment are most important, adding, Because it involves many steps—electronic medical record (EMR) registration, approvals by the administration team, installation and explanation, and follow-up—hospital systems and staff must support it. She added, DTx costs around 250,000 won per session (six weeks), and because it is in app form, patients face a psychological barrier wondering, Is this really a therapeutic?, and explaining this is also the doctor's role.
Yongin Severance Hospital is a leading digital innovation hospital in Korea, and having systems in place for DTx prescriptions is one of its strengths. It built the nation's first in-hospital 5G (fifth-generation mobile network) to implement smart care solutions, and introduced advanced technologies such as an AI (artificial intelligence)–based speech recognition system, a real-time location tracking system (RTLS), and an integrated emergency monitoring solution (IRS) to enhance patient safety and staff efficiency. Park serves as the head of the hospital's Digital Healthcare Industry Center, which oversees these efforts.
Park has also taken part in developing and conducting clinical trials for several digital therapeutics. In 2015, together with Lee Eun, a psychiatry professor at Severance Hospital, she implemented a cognitive behavioral therapy program for older adults with insomnia as an app, which laid the groundwork for developing SleepQ.
She said, Patients who use the app consistently see their symptoms improve even without medication, and when combined with medication, it has a synergistic effect, adding, It is not only for the young; older adults also use it well once they become familiar with it. In 2022, Park co-founded the digital therapeutics company DigitalMedic and co-developed Avecmom, an anxiety treatment device for pregnant women. Clinical trials are underway.
Park said that for digital therapeutics to become more widespread, institutional issues must be solved before technology. The reason digital therapeutics have not taken firm root in clinical practice is not their treatment efficacy but low reimbursement and institutional barriers, she said, pointing out, Regulations are changing in a forward-looking direction, but with doctors already facing heavy clinical workloads, assigning installation, explanation, and monitoring of digital therapeutics to them creates a significant burden.
The difficulty for patients to intuitively feel the efficacy is also a limitation created by the system. Park said, To pass regulatory review, products are designed conservatively, which makes it hard for patients to immediately feel they are innovative, adding, Society needs to recognize digital therapeutics as medical practice and provide institutional support so that prescriptions can be actively made.