Healthcare Systems Moving Toward Data Governance-Centered Model: India’s G20 Presidency in the Wake of COVID

Abstract

The COVID pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on health systems across countries. Both the public and private healthcare sectors have struggled and are still struggling to respond to the impact of the pandemic. The struggle lies in adopting diverse healthcare responses, involving cutting-edge technological tools and innovations in the areas of public health, medicine, and wellness, to make prompt decisions to address the after-effects of the pandemic. In such a scenario, digital health has emerged as a solution for healthcare challenges. It encompasses areas like wearable technology, telehealth and telemedicine, mobile health, health information technology, and personalized medicine (Guo et al., 2020). However, revisiting and reopening the realm of ‘digital health’ in policy and public discourse is an emerging concern (Banner, 2020). As the healthcare world becomes increasingly digitized, care and service providers rely more on data to drive their decision-making. This has made data governance in healthcare a growing interest, as health information becomes an essential tool for diagnosis, treatment planning, and after-care. However, it is now the responsibility of healthcare organizations to guarantee that patient data is handled and managed appropriately to uphold patient privacy and the confidentiality of data governance, as the latter can provide users with a great deal of power.