Data-driven healthcare represents a paradigm shift for medicine, with huge potential for personalised, preventive healthcare and for early interventions. This is enabled by the progressive integration of digital health records with multi-omics data and medical imagery, as well as with self-monitoring data coming from personal wellness wearables—and all alongside advances in our capacity to manage, analyse and extract insights from the data at scale.

However, these technologies also bring new and old challenges to the fore, around privacy, ethics, and ownership of personal information. In this Northern Data Debate, a panel of experts unpack the latest developments, and debates the myriad promises and challenges that surround innovations in healthcare and data