Artificial Intelligence (AI), when scaled responsibly, holds significant potential for healthcare systems. Yet significant barriers to its adoption remain, including fragmented data foundations, regulatory uncertainty, and gaps in governance and workforce capacity. Unleashing AI’s potential to benefit everyone’s health requires the balancing of market forces and health culture.
OECD Member countries are undertaking initiatives to address these gaps, such as establishing a strategies and action plans at the intersection of AI and health. To support these actions, a coherent policy checklist was developed to guide decision making and prioritisation and to avoid blind spots.
The checklist is organised into four pillars: establishing enablers (for data foundations, assuring and scaling AI, and capacity building); implementing guardrails (to oversee and monitor progress toward common objectives); engaging meaningfully with the public, providers and industry; and deploying trustworthy AI. Across the four pillars, nine main policy categories and 43 questions have emerged as critical for responsibly scaling the benefits of AI in health.
Action will be accelerated by learning from each other and solving challenges together. A shared recognition has emerged: that coherent, cross-border compatible policies are essential to balance innovation with safety, and economic opportunity with building public trust.
