Privacy Enhancing Technologies and why they're vital for healthcare innovation

The COVID-19 pandemic has supercharged the scope of the issues the global healthcare industry was already grappling with. When the pandemic arrived, healthcare organisations often struggled to find the basic information they needed to respond -- whether it was disease and death rates or the availability of hospital beds and critical supplies. Among other problems, the pandemic highlighted the desperate need for collaborative data analytics in healthcare. As McKinsey observed, healthcare's digital barriers are often decidedly non-technological. The technology is out there (or rapidly evolving) -- in October 2020, Pfizer and IBM researchers announced that they have developed a machine learning technique that can predict Alzheimer's disease years before symptoms develop.