Rethinking Data Sharing at the Dawn of a Health Data Economy: A Viewpoint

A health data economy has begun to form, but its rise has been tempered by the profound lack of sharing of both data and data products such as models, intermediate results, and annotated training corpora, and this severely limits the potential for triggering economic cluster effects. Economic cluster effects represent a means to elicit benefit from economies of scale from internal data innovations and are beneficial because they may mitigate challenges from external sources. Within institutions, data product sharing is needed to spark data entrepreneurship and data innovation, and cross-institutional sharing is also critical, especially for rare conditions.