SHANGHAI - Disease recognizes no borders. It largely does not discriminate based on ethnicity or gender.

Sickle-cell anemia and breast and prostate cancers are all mere exceptions that prove this rule. All who do not perish early from accident or misadventure must eventually succumb to disease in some form. Any barriers to the free-flow of medical data - whether domestic or international - handicap medicine in its race against disease and pose a grave threat to us all.

One team of academics and industry leaders argues, “…the storage and processing of such a huge amount of data with variability in data formats pose many challenges. A computer model that can store, run, and analyze the massive amount of data simultaneously is required to overcome these technical challenges. It has been advocated by many that an open-access health data platform on a global scale is required to store, manage, and share citizen-owned health data by taking a transparent and protected approach,” they reported in OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology.

In this spirit, and in line with our foundational tenet that artificial intelligence and the data upon which it feeds must redound to the benefit of all, the select panel of our contributors we have convened for this purpose shall present their cases as follows:

Jeffrey Lee Funk will expound on Open Access: the Need for Independent Testing, but also talk incentives for high data quality. Faulty or inadequate data can cause AI algorithms to be less effective than they might be. Instead of just assuming more data is needed, a better focus would be on improving their quality.

Rohit Agrawal will argue that Open Access to Health Data Can Fix India's Healthcare, which is full of inefficiencies