The Economist Events held a roundtable sponsored by InterSystems on Health Data Economy: Vehicles for Discovery. It was moderated by Alan Lovell, senior associate for health policy and clinical evidence, The Economist Intelligence Unit, and the discussion included Samira Asma, assistant director-general, data, analytics and delivery for impact, World Health Organisation, Mark Caulfield, chief scientist, Genomics England, Joshua Denny, chief executive, All of Us Research Programme, US National Institutes of Health, and Alex MacLeod, head of global health-care initiatives, InterSystems.
The discussion examined a number of urgent questions:
- How will the debate between the use of patient data for commercial gain and the pursuit of the greater good continue to evolve?
- Who owns data in the digital age: the person represented by the data, or the entity that collects the data?
- What are the biggest barriers to creating a global health-data economy?
- How can we synchronise information systems and standardise data across a fragmented health-care landscape?
- What are the technical hurdles to acquiring and using data, and how do we make unstructured data comprehensible and usable?
This Executive Summary report was produced as a companion to the recent The Economist Events Webinar - "Health Data Economy: Vehicles for Discovery"