Israel allocates $380m to becoming global leader in digital healthcare

Israel is looking to establish largest database of medical information. Photo/123RF.

Israel wants to recruit 100,000 volunteers over five years for a research project that it hopes will turn it into a global leader in digital healthcare.

The US$275 million (NZ$380 million) initiative, announced March 25, will launch in the fourth quarter of this year, said Eli Groner, director general of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office. The government wants to build the world's largest digitised database of medical information, which could be used by researchers, drug companies and doctors.

"We anticipate creating a whole new industry here of medical research, pharmaceutical companies, startups," Groner told reporters Wednesday. "We expect it will be a major growth driver for the Israeli economy."

Netanyahu has touted digital healthcare as a future pillar of Israel's economy, alongside autonomous driving technology and cyber-security. He predicted the initiative could help Israel grab 10 percent of the global health-care market, though he gave no details of how he arrived at that estimate. There are more than 1,500 health-care and life-sciences firms operating in Israel, according to 8400 Health Network, a nonprofit group seeking to boost the industry.

Israel has two key advantages for the project, according to Groner: a relatively small and centralised health-care system, and years of digitised medical data on nearly all its citizens. To participate in the project, volunteers would need to give permission for their clinical, DNA and physiological records to be added to the database.

The Israeli project is an "exceptionally thoughtful idea," said Jeremy Levin, chief executive officer of New York-based Ovid Therapeutics Inc. and former head of Teva Pharmaceutical Ltd., the world's largest generic drugmaker. "It's really helpful, and if they tie it to genetic data its value will be tremendous."

National digital-health projects already exist in the U.K. and Scandinavia, Iceland is trying to sequence its citizens' genes, and Stanford University in California is running a digital health-tracking program. The Israeli plan has the potential to go further, Levin said.

"It needs to have clinical, epidemiological, biochemical and genetic data," he said. "Because Israel has one of the best medical systems in the world, it will help define patient subgroups and attract investment from companies seeking to do clinical trials on a well-defined population."

Coming amid intense public debate on data security in the wake of Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, the announcement has raised concerns about how participants' health data would be protected.

Hackers are eager to steal patient data, which contain personal details that might help them break into bank accounts or embarrassing information that could be used for extortion, according to Daniel Brodie, co-founder of Cynerio, an Israeli startup specializing in cyber-security for health-care providers.

Israeli regulation of patient data is "very behind" the U.S. and Europe, Brodie said, echoing what Groner called a "Wild West" situation where data gathered by health maintenance organizations isn't currently monitored by a governmental body.

"I get queasy when I see the government rushing ahead when you're not sure if the government can protect the data like it should," said Brodie, whose firm is working with eight Israeli hospitals and HMOs and is helping the government craft cyber regulation in that field. "Even if the people are volunteering, it's not a question about if it will be hacked, but when and how prepared the government is for that."

Groner said officials are working on regulations limiting how the data could be used and what measures must be in place to protect it.

A former member of Israel's national baseball team, Groner likened the digital health project to the explosion of data analysis that revolutionised the sport, as immortalised in Michael Lewis' "Moneyball."

"You'll be able to identify insights that mankind previously has been unable to identify," he said.