Digitalization of public health

The OECD experience

In November 2025, the OECD presented¹ a report on the digitization of public health, highlighting best practices in four areas:

1. Ramping up human resource capacity. Australia has launched a program to improve the digital literacy of medical professionals, where doctors are trained to work with hospital medical information systems.

2. Technological equipment. The OECD recommends using cloud solutions for data storage in healthcare (reducing the load on hospital IT infrastructure); establishing criteria for ensuring data confidentiality in public procurement procedures for hospital software; ensuring the scalability of IT solutions for hospitals; using open source software with builtin compatibility standards for hospital interaction.

3. Formation of health data architecture. New Zealand has approved standards for the interoperability of data and information systems for the exchange of the most frequently requested health data between hospitals.

4. Organizing public participation in data management. Canada has adopted a standard for self-governance of health data for indigenous peoples, who can independently regulate the collection of and access to data in medical organizations.

The US experience

In November 2025, a reform of medical information privacy protection was proposed in² the United States: it was recommended that digital service providers for medical services (such as SberZdorovye, SmartMed, etc.) be assigned obligations similar to those of data operators. These obligations are established by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) only for hospitals and insurance companies. Organizations such as platforms are not obligated to protect health data.

The rights of personal data subjects to access, delete, and transfer data, to refuse to sell their data to third parties, and to receive notifications in clear language and in an understandable form are also enshrined in law. Previously, such rights were enshrined at the state level, but now they are enshrined at the federal level.

Singapore’s experience

Singapore is continuing to develop a national electronic record system for the collection, storage, and disclosure of health data. Hospitals are required to upload specific types of patient data to the system and comply with technical requirements. Access to the information in the system will be granted to the data subjects themselves and to healthcare providers, including pharmacies. Two types of data can be accessed in the system:

1) Health information that directly identifies an individual (used to provide medical services to patients).

2) Anonymized and aggregated data from hospitals for researchers. To obtain data, researchers must specify the purpose of the information request and their intentions regarding the further disclosure of the information obtained to third parties.

Russia’s experience

Back in 2024, Russia approved its “Strategic Direction for Digital Transformation of Healthcare until 2030,” which included providing patients and medical organizations with access to health data through the Unified State³ Information System for Healthcare (EGISZ). Since 2025, all medical organizations have been required to maintain medical records in electronic format. However, the economic potential of such health data collection is not being fully realized—there is no centralized access to the data collected for researchers or medical technology developers. Opening up access to such data would reduce research costs by up to 9% by reducing the amount of⁴ duplication in research.

From the monitoring issue No. 11 (23), November 2025. Download the full issue (PDF) · issue page at the Gaidar Institute