Digital Transformation and Public Policies

2The Regulation of Public Data: The Difficult Case of the Health Sector

If I had to illustrate only one sectoral asset of France in terms of data, and therefore artificial intelligence, it would be the health sector. In the health sector, we know that medical diagnosis, treatment protocols, predictive and preventive medicine are undergoing radical changes. Thanks to artificial intelligence, we are moving towards innovations that will allow us to prevent pathologies, and therefore to drastically reduce the total cost, and to move towards individual medicine, which will also allow us to reduce costs and improve our quality of life and longevity. So, this transformation is absolutely radical and it will affect all sectors of medicine (Translated excerpt from the speech by Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic, Paris, Collège de France, AI for Humanity, Thursday, March 29, 2018).

Health is thus listed as one of the two priority areas of the French strategic policy on artificial intelligence “AI for humanity” announced in March 2018 following the submission of the report¹ of the parliamentary mission chaired by Cédric Villani². In the same way as the automotive sector, the other priority area, the health sector is seen as a key area for French economic development. While in the case of the automobile sector, the aim is to “make up for lost time” in “experimentation and development of the autonomous car”³, in the case of healthcare, the aim is to capitalize on the “massive ...