AI has significant potential to help save lives, improve health professionals’ work, and make health systems more people centred. It can help address some of health’s largest challenges including a depleted workforce, future threats to public health, ageing populations, and increasing complexity of health due to comorbidities. It is crucial to make use of this powerful new tool while also mitigating its risks, such as data privacy, bias from AI solutions trained on poor quality data and expanding inequities.
Digital health
Digital health has an increasing role in health systems and healthcare delivery, such as through telemedicine and the use of artificial intelligence. Opportunities must be managed with risks, equity considerations, and implementation costs. The OECD seeks to foster international co-operation for a digital transformation that protects people and achieves better outcomes.
Key messages
Health Ministers from OECD countries welcomed the Recommendation on Health Data Governance on 17 January 2017. This recommendation paves the way for health data interoperability, ensuring a careful balance between advancing public policy objectives – such as engagement, transparency and informed consent – while ensuring safeguards to minimise privacy and security risks.
OECD countries are all undergoing transformation of their health systems. However, there are few measurements for the digitalisation of health systems in terms of their readiness, adoption and impact. The OECD assists countries through Health Information Infrastructure Reviews to understand their current state and provides guidance on actions they could take to achieve the ambitions of their digital health strategies. These reviews are being constantly updated to reflect the changing environment of artificial intelligence, the adoption of digital tools, and the public sentiment for the effective use of health data to improve health outcomes.
Context
Telemedicine
COVID-19 ushered in a telemedicine boom in health systems across the globe. Faced with significant disruptions to in-person care, governments moved quickly to promote the use of remote care.
The number of teleconsultations skyrocketed in all countries in the early months of the pandemic, partly offsetting the reduction in in-person care services, and played a vital role in maintaining access to care. In 2019, there was an average of 0.6 teleconsultations per patient per year among OECD countries. By 2021, this rate had more than doubled, with significant increases in Australia, Lithuania and Slovenia.
Telemedicine may be here to stay, but questions remain concerning how to regulate its use, how to pay for it, how to integrate it with in-person care, and how to make sure that it constitutes good value for money for all.
Health data availability
Health data is necessary to improve the quality, safety and patient-centredness of health care services, to support scientific innovation, the discovery and evaluation of new treatments, and to help redesign health service delivery. However, often the data is held in silos by the organisations collecting them. That said, key national health datasets are widely available across countries and significant investments are made in health, healthcare monitoring and research in all countries.
Overall, countries with the highest level of health data availability in 2019/20 are Denmark, Korea, Sweden, Finland and Latvia. However, on average only half of respondents are able to link those national health datasets for use in research, reporting statistics, or monitoring performance. In order to fully utilise the health information available to policymakers, countries can improve the timeliness and quality of this data through health data governance and interoperable standards.
