Israel will invest nearly 1 billion shekels ($287 million) in a project to make data about the state of the population's health available to researchers and private companies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Almost all of Israel's almost 9 million citizens belong to four health maintenance organizations – Maccabi, Clalit, Leumit and Meuhedet – who keep members' records digitally, creating a huge medical database.
"This is a major asset and we want to make it accessible to researchers and developers in order to achieve two things: one is preventive medicine, and the second is personal medicine tailored to each individual," Netanyahu told the cabinet.
Nadav Davidovitch, head of the Public Health School at Ben-Gurion University in southern Israel, said Israel's push to harness big data for health care has huge potential but also carries risks in terms of privacy and medical confidentiality.
Davidovitch voiced concern that private companies would profit by using a publicly funded database while continuing to make some medications unaffordable to many patients.
A statement from Netanyahu's office said mechanisms would be put in place to keep information anonymous, protect privacy and security, and restrict access as part of the government project.
Patients will be able to refuse the use of their information for research, the statement said.
Digital health records are valuable. Big data analytics – comparing information about large numbers of patients – give some of the world's biggest drugmakers indications of how medicines perform in the real world.
Netanyahu said world leaders and international firms have already shown interest in the project and that the potential revenue for Israel could be in the billions of dollars.
All the world's major drug companies now have departments focused on the use of real-world data for a variety of diseases. Several have completed scientific studies using the information to delve into key areas addressed by their drugs. These include diabetes studies by AstraZeneca and Sanofi, joint research by Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb into stroke prevention, and a Takeda Pharmaceutical project on bowel disease.
Real-world evidence involves collecting data outside traditional randomized clinical trials, the current gold standard for judging medicines, and interest in the field is ballooning
