Health data poverty: an assailable barrier to equitable digital health care

Data-driven digital health technologies have the power to transform health care. If these tools could be sustainably delivered at scale, they might have the potential to provide everyone, everywhere, with equitable access to expert-level care, narrowing the global health and wellbeing gap. Conversely, it is highly possible that these transformative technologies could exacerbate existing health-care inequalities instead. In this Viewpoint, we describe the problem of health data poverty: the inability for individuals, groups, or populations to benefit from a discovery or innovation due to a scarcity of data that are adequately representative. We assert that health data poverty is a threat to global health that could prevent the benefits of data-driven digital health technologies from being more widely realised and might even lead to them causing harm. We argue that the time to act is now to avoid creating a digital health divide that exacerbates existing health-care inequalities and to ensure that no one is left behind in the digital era. today are amassing health data at astronomical rates, with estimates putting the total volume of health data in 2020 at 2314 exabytes?where one exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes.11 Second, how are health data used? Health data are used to benefit patients and the public, and the use of health data can be classified as either primary or secondary. The primary (direct) use is where health data are used to deliver health care to the individual from whom they were collected.12 Here, health data inform health-care professionals when making diagnoses and decisions relating to an individual?s care. The secondary (indirect) use is where health data are used to improve health care