Israel is moving forward to invest in nationwide interoperability and artificial intelligence efforts to better leverage the electronic health records (EHRs) that already store its citizens’ patient information. As Dov Lieber reports in a Sep. 15 article in The Wall Street Journal, “Digital medical records for the vast majority of Israelis are currently stored in databases maintained by the handful of semipublic HMOs that provide most health care in Israel. While the biggest health-maintenance organizations already leverage their records in partnerships with private companies to develop technology for more advanced health care, Israel’s government wants to take such efforts to a new level.”
In that context, Lieber writes, “The government last year announced a $264 million initiative to begin to combine those millions of records into a giant unified system, one that takes decades of individual patients’ information and puts it all in the same format so medical data looks the same across all health-care institutions. Corralling the records and organizing them in ways that maximize their usefulness to AI programs and data analytics, the government hopes, will make the data of even greater value to researchers and health-care companies. And the greater goals, officials say, based largely on the promise of AI technology, are to make health care less expensive, more effective and better tailored to individuals everywhere.”
Lieber goes on to write that “Israel’s plans rely on patients giving their consent for their clinical data to be transferred from the HMOs to the government system. Patients who agree will be asked to supply genetic information and other additional data as well. Medical experts and government officials in Israel are still grappling with the ethical and privacy implications of the initiative,” he adds. “But a number of international health officials say the potential benefits outweigh the pitfalls. Israel’s health-care system already is globally recognized as a leader in using digitally stored data for public health-care delivery. This includes HMO programs and activities such as constantly running algorithms on their patients’ data to detect signs of kidney disease or colon cancer.”
