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Busan Wins Top Excellence Award at the 2026 Pseudonymized Information Utilization Competition for Second Consecutive Year

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Busan Metropolitan City, led by Mayor Chun Jae-soo, announced that it won the Top Excellence Award in the Best Practices category at the 2026 Pseudonymized Information Utilization Competition, hosted yesterday, September 30, by the Personal Information Protection Commission.

The 2026 Pseudonymized Information Utilization Competition was jointly hosted by the Personal Information Protection Commission, the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the Financial Services Commission. Aimed at raising public awareness and expanding the use of pseudonymized information, the competition was held in two categories: Best Practices and Ideas.

At this year’s competition, Busan Metropolitan City, together with Busan Techno Park, presented “A Study Assessing Healthcare Service Coverage Based on Characteristics of Busan Medical Bus Users” and received the Top Excellence Award.

The study conducted an in-depth analysis of policy effectiveness by combining, in pseudonymized form, data from the city’s key healthcare initiative, the Visiting Medical Bus program, including users’ health information, with benefit-recipient information held by the Korea Social Security Information Service.

While conventional medical bus data alone made it difficult to identify users’ economic circumstances or social vulnerabilities, the pseudonymized combination of heterogeneous datasets enabled a multidimensional analysis of users’ socioeconomic characteristics, monthly and user-specific utilization patterns, and the extent to which target populations benefited from the policy.

The analysis was particularly well received for expanding the paradigm of policy evaluation from “how much was the service used,” or simple performance measurement, to “who did the policy reach,” focusing on policy reach.

Going beyond the secure processing of data, the study presented a new approach that uses actual data integration to identify gaps in welfare coverage and improve policy effectiveness.

This achievement was supported by the active assistance of the Busan Pseudonymized Information Utilization Support Center, a specialized institution for pseudonymized information operated by Busan Metropolitan City.

Since opening in August 2022, the center has supported data-driven administration by providing infrastructure, consulting, training, and other services related to pseudonymized information, with the aim of invigorating the data economy in southeastern Korea.

As a result, following last year’s Top Excellence Award for its “Analysis of Consumption Patterns of Visitors to Busan Based on Guests at Luxury Hotels,” Busan Metropolitan City has achieved the distinction of winning the competition’s Top Excellence Award for two consecutive years.

Yoon Jeong-no, Director of Planning at Busan Metropolitan City, said, “This analysis demonstrates that pseudonymized information can go beyond simply serving as a means of securely processing data and can be used to identify policies that citizens genuinely need and to assess their effectiveness. We will continue to actively utilize pseudonymized information and a wide range of other data to expand data-driven administration that delivers tangible benefits to citizens.”