Regulatory Sandbox in the Singaporean Healthcare Sector and Its Implications to Korea

Regulatory sandbox has attracted the regulators’ attention worldwide as a critical strategy for regulatory reforms in the healthcare sector. Korea also initiated its version of a regulatory sandbox in emerging industries, including the healthcare sector, which has been tightly restricted due to ambiguity in service classification and the existence of legislative gaps. Utilizing regulatory sandbox as an effective strategy to promote innovation in emerging industries requires a more considerable administrative effort beyond the initiative’s implementation. Regulatory sandbox itself is merely a testbed for granting interim authorization or a temporary waiver from the current positive-list system. Regulators thus need to know that the ultimate goal of implementing regulatory sandbox is to revise relevant legislation and to support the soft landing of selected projects in the market by eliminating regulatory risks. In such a context, accurately evaluating the performance and improvement direction of regulatory sandbox requires more than quantitative measures such as several applications and approvals. The structure of the regulatory sandbox initiated by Singapore’s Ministry of Health is different from that of Korea, but its unique, project-supportive, and closely-monitored nature can still be quite thought-provoking. This paper aims to investigate regulatory sandboxes in the Singaporean healthcare sector and provide valuable insights into the Korean regulatory sandbox, which is still in its early years.