TL;DR — Taiwan’s NHI publishes complete, well-structured public data, but a cross-language, interactive entry point hasn’t fully emerged yet. As regenerative medicine becomes a global focus, this missing interface is a real gap worth filling. I’m starting with what I personally use: turning the NHIA’s “30 Catastrophic Illness Categories” into a trilingual, searchable tool, and launching a “Regenerative Medicine Tech” series on paulkuo.tw.

The original plan was the opposite of how the project actually evolved.

In 2024, a Taiwanese medtech company hoped to work with Sepong International to bring Taiwan’s cell factory construction and operational services to Japan. The project rested on what Taiwan’s semiconductor supply chain has accumulated over decades: cleanroom standards, process validation, supplier networks, and the discipline of construction teams. They had integrated a cell-therapy-ready facility design and intended to deliver it as a turn-key system to Japan for production.

After more than a year of exploration, the project shifted from a one-direction service export to a deeper Taiwan-Japan partnership. By mid-2025, both sides were planning to set up a Japanese subsidiary in Taiwan, with the goal of bringing a specific cell therapy for a difficult-to-treat disease to clinical use here. Sepong International coordinates the Taiwan side. Chairman Jerry Lee (李建樑) is the primary point of contact, and I joined as Chief Strategy Officer and partner.

Our medical advisor is Taiwanese, but he was raised in Japan from childhood. He works in Japanese and English. He does not read Chinese, which means anything related to Taiwan’s NHI or pharmaceutical regulations comes with an extra layer of language friction for him.

We prepare materials for him often: how Taiwan’s NHI classifies “Catastrophic Illness,” which version of ICD-10 applies in Taiwan, how long the certificate for a particular diagnosis stays valid. These are the basic things you need to understand before any pharmaceutical filing in Taiwan.

So I open the NHIA’s Catastrophic Illness Categories page.

The Chinese version is complete. All 30 categories, ICD-10-CM codes, certificate validity periods, every legal revision in history. Six file download links lined up there in PDF, ODT, and ODS formats. The content is all there.

The English version does have a corresponding page, called Patients with Catastrophic Illnesses or Rare Diseases, but its content is mostly conceptual prose: what catastrophic illness is, how to apply, what benefits follow. Our Japanese-side medical experts already understand these concepts. What they need is something queryable: which code maps to which diagnosis, which of the 30 categories it falls under, how long the certificate lasts. That kind of searchable, cross-referenced detail currently exists only in the Chinese files.

There is no Japanese version.

So every time I need to answer a question from the Japanese side, I download the Chinese ODT, scroll to page three, find the relevant entry, translate that piece of Traditional Chinese into Japanese or English, and paste it back into LINE or email.

The data is findable. But what you find still has to pass through a person before it can be used in a cross-language collaboration.

The Data Is Comprehensive. The Next Evolution Is the Interface.

To be fair, by completeness and openness alone, the NHIA’s data publishing is among the better in Asia.

The Catastrophic Illness Categories page has had a complete version since 2015 (ROC year 104), with files updated synchronously every time the regulation is revised. The latest version was published on September 16, 2024 (ROC 113/9/16), effective January 1, 2025 (ROC 114/1/1), aligned with the ICD-10-CM/PCS 2023 edition. Six historical versions are kept in the same folder, from pre-2015 versions to the current one — useful for anyone studying institutional evolution or doing year-over-year comparisons.

In format, PDF is there for reading. ODT and ODS are there for editing. The 30 categories’ ICD-10-CM codes, certificate validity periods, and sub-item breakdowns are all structured and presented.

That is to say: by content and structure alone, the NHIA has done the foundational work well.

What is genuinely missing is not the data itself. It is the “cross-language, interactive, shareable” interface layer.

If what you need is “open a webpage, type in a diagnosis term, and immediately see the matching catastrophic illness number, validity period, classification chapter, with the ability to switch between English or Japanese for your collaborator” — that entry point doesn’t exist yet.

Public Data Worldwide Is Being Re-Interfaced for Both Humans and Machines

Pulling the camera back, this is not a problem unique to one country.

How people query information in the AI era is changing. Ten years ago we used Google. Five years ago we relied on Wikipedia entries. Now more and more people just ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude directly. The next generation of users may not even start by “opening the official website.” They will ask AI directly, and AI needs to be able to retrieve answers from open interfaces that are multilingual, structured, and interactive.

This means every country’s public data faces the same evolutionary pressure: from “static downloadable files” to “machine-readable, cross-language, interactive” interface layers. Japan’s MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare), the U.S. CMS, the U.K.’s NHS, Singapore’s MOH, Canada’s Health Canada — all are working at different paces on the same question: how to make public data not just “open” but actually usable by people across languages and professional backgrounds. No country has finished this work.

Taiwan has its own strengths. The single-payer NHI system gives a level of data integration that few countries can match. ICD-10 coding is tightly bound to “catastrophic illness,” “special care,” and reimbursement schemes, with consistent logic. Regulatory updates move quickly. The Regenerative Medicine Act and the Regenerative Medicine Products Act both took effect on February 25, 2026 — uncommonly fast by global standards.

So the question is not who is faster or slower. It is that this global evolution of public-data interfaces is still a work in progress, everywhere.

ICD-10 Is Not Something I Look Up on Wikipedia

I did not first encounter ICD-10 through Wikipedia. I studied life sciences in college, and earlier I was a medical technologist. Back then, this was the disease classification system running on the computers in clinical settings. The 10th revision of the International Classification of Diseases has over 22,000 codes. Each letter represents a system-level category: A for infectious diseases, C for malignant neoplasms, I for circulatory, M for musculoskeletal and connective tissue, Q for congenital anomalies, and so on. I am familiar with the structure.

Taiwan’s NHI binds ICD-10 to the “Catastrophic Illness Categories.” The same diagnosis, placed under different chapters, results in different certificate validity periods, different exemption scopes for co-payment, and different downstream reimbursement paths. This local design layer is the accumulated logic of three decades of Taiwan’s NHI.

The NHIA publishes all of this in full — PDF, ODT, ODS, all three formats. The content is there.

But complete content alone is not enough. As long as the collaborator does not read Chinese, someone still has to translate the data from those files into a language and format the other side can use.

Starting With One ODT Page, Adding One Entry Point

Why did I start with the “30 Catastrophic Illness Categories”? Because this is exactly the file I have actually organized and digested for work. Downloading the ODT, cross-referencing ICD-10, building the 30 categories into a mental structural map — that process was itself a good way for me to learn Taiwan’s NHI system.

But after the organizing was done, the result lived only in my head and in a few email drafts. If this digested content is valuable to my collaborator, it should be valuable to the next Taiwanese professional returning from Japan, the next BD coming from the U.S. to evaluate investment in Taiwan, the next family member just diagnosed and trying to understand their rights, the next regulatory consultant preparing a pharmaceutical filing.

The tool page is not meant to replace the NHIA’s official data. It builds on the foundation the government has already laid, and adds a “cross-language, interactive” entry point. Links to the original files will be prominent on the tool page, so users can always go back to the MOHW website to confirm the latest version.

This is just the first brick. More can be added later.

Why This Series, Why Now

Why launch the “Regenerative Medicine Tech” series?

On the professional side: Taiwan’s Regenerative Medicine Act and Regenerative Medicine Products Act only took effect on February 25, 2026. The rules of the game for Taiwan’s regenerative medicine industry are being recalibrated, and the industry itself is entering a new starting phase. But if you search in English or Japanese, you will find that Taiwan’s regulatory context, industry progress, and key data in this field still lack a complete and approachable entry point. As post-AI-era medicine, regenerative medicine, and longevity services gradually become a global focus, Taiwan has the industrial and regulatory foundation to participate. What is still missing is the accessibility of relevant data — an entry point that hasn’t fully matured yet.

On the personal side: Starting in 2024, I tried exosome-related treatments at a friend’s clinic, continuing for about a year and a half. There was no dramatic transformation, just small differences in daily life: more stable energy, better mental clarity, less noticeable discomfort after drinking. Other aspects are still under observation. I am not packaging this experience as some miraculous testimonial. But as someone who, in 2024, was willing to spend my own money to try, I do believe this industry will gradually develop.

There is one more layer. Thirty years ago, when I first stepped into life sciences and medical technology, Taiwan’s biotech industry was in the “about to take off, but hadn’t yet” stage. Later I changed careers, and assumed I would not have a chance to engage deeply with this field again. Then the AI era arrived. Almost every domain is being rewritten by digitalization, and the path I had walked started reconnecting in a new context.

This brings to mind Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech in 2005:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path; and that will make all the difference.”

If this industry is about to enter a growth phase, it will need more entry points that readers from different backgrounds can understand, query, and use.

The “Regenerative Medicine Tech” series on paulkuo.tw starts here. I will gradually add what I find useful in my own work and what others might find useful too. If you are interested in “building your own data infrastructure,” see what I wrote earlier on Personal Health Data Infrastructure — same logic, applied at the personal scale. And if you have ever been stuck on a seemingly-public-but-hard-to-use ODT file, this series may be useful.

We start with this page.

Glossary

  • ODT (OpenDocument Text): Open document text format. Similar to .docx but under an open license. Can be opened by LibreOffice, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word.
  • ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet): Open document spreadsheet format. Similar to .xlsx but under an open license. Can be opened by LibreOffice, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel.
  • PDF (Portable Document Format): Cross-platform format optimized for reading. Content is fixed and not easily edited.
  • ICD-10-CM/PCS (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, Clinical Modification / Procedure Coding System): The WHO’s international classification of diseases. CM contains over 22,000 clinical diagnosis codes; PCS covers inpatient procedure codes. Taiwan’s NHI fully adopted ICD-10-CM/PCS in 2016, and the MOHW updates the Taiwan version with reference to the annual U.S. CMS edition, with local adaptation as needed.
  • Catastrophic Illness (重大傷病): The 30 categories of disease designated in Annex 1, Article 2 of the National Health Insurance regulations on co-payment exemption. Holders of a catastrophic illness certificate are exempt from co-payment for related treatment.
  • Regenerative Medicine Act (再生醫療法): The law regulating medical institutions that perform cell therapy, effective February 25, 2026. Governs the “medical practice” side.
  • Regenerative Medicine Products Act (再生醫療製劑條例): The law regulating pharmaceutical companies that develop, manufacture, and market regenerative medicine products (including cell therapy drugs), effective February 25, 2026. Governs the “pharmaceutical company” side. Together, these two are referred to as the “Regenerative Medicine Twin Acts.”
  • turn-key system: A complete, ready-to-use system delivered to the buyer.
  • GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice): International standards for pharmaceutical product quality during manufacturing.