Intelligent system governance, stewardship and resource allocation

Health systems could harness information and communications (ICT) technology and data in several ways to improve governance and guide resource allocation. Despite the availability of technologies, institutional and organisational artefacts of the pre-digital era are a barrier to progress. While digitalisation makes long-standing fragmentation more apparent and can catalyse reforms, it can also lead to further fragmentation if ICT systems are not interoperable. Policy also needs to constrain the incentives for private owners of data to turn them into a scarce commodity and prevent other entities with legitimate interests from accessing and analysing them. Countries can make progress by defining comprehensive and inter-sectoral strategies, by instituting data governance frameworks and infrastructure to make data readily available for legitimate purposes while protecting privacy, and by investing heavily in capacity to generate knowledge from data and to deploy this knowledge to improve health system performance.