WEF – Transforming Healthcare, 2024

The World Economic Forum (WEF) recognizes the urgent need for the digital transformation of healthcare to address the global challenges facing the industry. These challenges include rising costs, wasteful healthcare spending, a shortage of healthcare workers, an increasing burden of chronic diseases, and inequitable access to care. While there has been progress in digitizing the front-end of healthcare systems to optimize the patient experience and improve outcomes, the transformative impact of digital, data, and AI is yet to be seen. It is crucial to focus on digital applications that have the potential to make a difference in patient outcomes. Value-based healthcare, which relies on data and analytics to measure patient outcomes and cost drivers, is increasingly reliant on digital, data, and AI transformation. To unlock the potential of these technologies, stakeholders in the healthcare system must work together on five key enablers: leveraging health data, engineering a robust foundation for digital healthcare, investing in and rewarding impact, strengthening digital capabilities, and crafting policies to enable digital transformation. The private sector has an opportunity to invest in and build businesses that can improve health outcomes through digital health. However, achieving better health at scale requires collaboration between the public and private sectors. The WEF aims to facilitate this collaboration by convening learning communities focused on scaling digital solutions and creating multistakeholder action groups to drive the deployment of digital solutions for healthcare challenges. Overall, the WEF is committed to accelerating the impact of digital, data, and AI in healthcare to improve health outcomes and resource efficiencies, working in synergy with other global efforts.