Health data governance in the age of artificial intelligence: policy imperatives for the WHO European Region

Overview

Effective health data governance is essential for creating trusted, digitally enabled health systems that deliver high-quality, equitable care to populations. It underpins actions that support interoperability and sharing of data, enhance data quality and facilitate evidence-informed decision-making to lead to better health outcomes.

Health data governance also plays a crucial role in supporting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in health, which is reliant upon access to large, high-quality datasets for training algorithms. In this context, health data governance ensures that data used for AI are ethically sourced, representative and free from bias, which helps in developing safe and reliable AI models that also enshrine gender, equity and human rights.

The 2022 WHO survey on digital health in the WHO European Region (referred to here as the 2022 WHO survey) highlighted several key trends and challenges concerning the collection, use and sharing of health data. These findings are summarized in the report on digital health in the European Region and underscore the importance of building strong governance frameworks to harness the potential of health data while safeguarding individual privacy.