This is a longstanding issue within healthcare with several factors contributing to it, from the perspective of observations made in the Republic of Ireland.

i) Standardisation: Technical healthcare infrastructure tenders should be compelled to adhere to the latest open standards; this should be set at a national level. Often you have bespoke hardware/software running within individual hospitals such that it is a burden to share electronic data between departments can introduce problems. The consequence of this is a reliance on paper-based records in many cases to collate information from disparate departments/services. Sub-factors contributing to this:

a) Vendors of medical equipment typically provide the bare minimum in terms of supporting open standards.

b) Hospitals are ill-equipped to from an infrastructure perspective to handle centralised data storage, patient records and local/national sharing of this data.

b) Hospitals do not sufficiently invest in IT personnel. They also lack the budget for recurring Enterprise level hardware/software solutions which would be expensive. This is understandable as they should not have to choose between frontline staff and IT - especially when the budget for Enterprise solutions to enable long-term productivity is not there.

ii) Regulatory - Data privacy legislation is outdated, as are the responsibilities/guidelines for those acquiring and storing the data. As such, it is almost better not to have as little data as possible - if data is persisted do not let it near the internet for fear of it being accessed by a malicious party. This prevents innovation.

iii) Healthcare is an extremely hierarchical process, with many layers in the middle. While this may have been necessary, it also results in natural resistance to change. I believe this will flatten as consumers of healthcare services become more informed and interested in controlling the quality of their health.

On the plus side, the significant innovators at present are healthcare insurers and wearable technology. The typical insurer is embracing activity trackers such as Fitbit and the apple watch. Additionally, they are providing health assessments every two years - where they run a broad series of tests to assess overall health and provide preventative screening. Naturally, this is in their interest, but it is absolutely a step in the right direction.

Big tech sees preventative healthcare via wearables as the next iPhone and rightly so. Take the example of the Apple Watch being able to detect Atrial Fibrillation (AF) via ECG. The watch costs approximately €400, which nation's healthcare systems should roll out en masse for at-risk demographics, old age pensioners etc.

A paper I previously published "Beats-Per-Minute (BPM): A Microservice-based Platform for the Monitoring of Health-Related Data via Activity Trackers" covered the use of activity trackers as a means of preventative screening. When researching the background, I came across a pilot study carried out by the Health Service Executive in 2006. It was called "Heartwatch", and the findings stated that a preventative in-person monitoring solution for detecting AF (two weeks of twice-daily visits to have a pulse reading) would be cost-effective at €20,000 per participant. So, the HSE could give every person aged 60+ an Apple watch today and start saving money due to the reduction in costs associated with post-stroke recovery immediately.

Personally, I think a combination of Big tech solutions and consumer-driven demand for improved analytics/tracking of their health will be the primary drivers of change in healthcare in the next ten years. It introduces a different set of challenges, but once the tech is ubiquitous, you will see more distributed systems for sharing/analysing data emerge (as opposed to being dominated by a small few such as Google/Apple). That is a strong source of motivation for a lot of my own work and will go a long way to addressing inconsistency in medical data.

The question becomes the degree to which national economies are affected by disease burdens when the nature of that burden is unclear because of different standards of reportage. Similarly, if you mean data on supply--for instance ventilators or certain medications--if unreliable the limits of those records will result in a lack of resources at treatment sites. The effect on the economy in the first will involve the cost of unanticipated disease incidence or the expansion of diseases (for example in epidemic cases) that might have been anticipated, with better records, and thus better prepared for. Similarly, if it's about supply of equipments or pharmaceuticals the shortages that result from inconsistent records will mean either higher costs for emergency purchase or higher mortality/morbidity in the absence of necessary equipment or pharmaceuticals. If the numbers are sufficient--for instance provision of vaccines, or undercounting of those with critical conditions requiring extensive medication, the effect may be broadly economic as well as clnical.

That was a fantastic contribution.

Your response to this question is appreciated. Thank you.