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
During the COVID‑19 pandemic, telemedicine was essential for delivering care.
In 2019, remote consultations via phone or video averaged 0.5 per patient per year across OECD countries. By 2021, this more than doubled to 1.3 teleconsultations, with significant increases in Australia, Lithuania, Spain and Slovenia. However, by 2023, the rate of teleconsultations had stabilised to 1.0 per patient per year, reflecting a partial retreat from pandemic peaks while maintaining levels well above pre‑pandemic baselines. Israel had the highest use in 2023 (2.8 teleconsultations per patient per year), while the largest post-pandemic drops occurred in Poland, Lithuania and Spain.
After realising the benefits through the pandemic, health systems have expanded use of remote consultations, although financial, legal and operational barriers still exist. Sustaining telemedicine use will require not only addressing legal and financial barriers, but also adapting payment systems, strengthening broadband infrastructure, and embedding teleconsultations into mainstream care pathways.
Digital health literacy
Building trust is essential to encourage the active use of digital health technologies.
The 2024 Patient‑Reported Indicator Surveys (PaRIS) survey highlights that older and less educated individuals are less confident in using digital tools to manage their health and report more difficulty understanding health information than younger and more‑educated individuals. Across the surveyed OECD countries, the gap in digital health literacy between education levels exceeds 15 percentage in France, Iceland, Australia, the United States and Wales (United Kingdom), with those having lower education reporting significantly less confidence. By contrast, in Slovenia, individuals with less education report higher confidence, and in Portugal and Belgium, the gap between groups is comparatively small.
